MindComet

My public declaration to fight SPAM

Spammers are everywhere. And without a doubt, they are the anti-midas, turning everything they touch into another 4-letter word that’s not “gold”.

Take for example, Twitter trending topics. It’s s a feature that is ripe for spam and in my opinion is now almost completely useless because of spammers. Twitter lists, probably one of the smartest platform features that Twitter has rolled out, is already littered with spammers. My DM stream is now useless. And I’m constantly pruning my blog comments for Viagra and phentermine offers, neither of which I need.

So here’s what I am doing. This is my public declaration of what I’m going to do to combat spam.

All blog comments are going to require approval by me

I honestly dread this. To me, it’s really annoying when you post a comment and your told that it’s awaiting moderation. However, at this point, I’m at my wits end. I could implement Captcha or get really elegant and use Mollom, but I just don’t have the time. Moderation is the most effective solution given my already busy workload.

I’m pruning my Twitter following list.

I was for quite some time a reciprocal guy. You follow me, I follow you. This stopped a few months ago, however, because of the practice, my following list if pretty large. That is going to change, no matter how long and arduous a process it is.

DM me a crap/spam message and you will be unfollowed.

I’m not even looking at my DM stream anymore, but that will change. Nuff said. You’ve been warned.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Nov. 17, 2009