I’m pink therefore I’m ham? :mrgreen:

Crazy amounts of spam out there… I think a lot of it comes from people trying to sell stuff, enlisting spammers to do so, and then whether there’s any eventual return or not we’re all choked with 10 million messages per capita.

Spam will persist for as long as people are willing to pay for spammy advertising for their crap, regardless of whether anyone’s buying from spam. You would hope that eventually they’ll find that it’s ineffective and stop doing it, but whatever happens there’ll either be a group who are dumb enough to buy from spam (and actually make it profitable) or who are dumb enough to advertise via spammers.

Mathew:

spam wouldn’t exist if a certain (small) percent of us didn’t click on spam and buy things from those advertisers.

Although you’re probably right, this isn’t neccersarily the case.

If spammers and spam tool makers are different people then it is only the spam tool makers that need to make money.

They can claim that people will make money if they buy their products and people fork over a couple of hundred quid for the kit and then fail to see any return. Rinse and repeat.

Couple this with a few forums full of sock puppets talking about how they’ve made money from spam and you can make a fortune out of the spammers without ever having to sell a penis enlarger.

But then again you still hear about people of sound mind* falling for 419 scams so…

Yeah, spam seems to go in cycles with big spikes before it calms down a bit and repeats.

@Ian G. Clifton: Maybe this is an internet wide spike. Scary!

@jambarama: No worries, I got the intent of the initial post the first time around. :)

@Matthew: Yeah, when I think of all that wasted bandwidth I get sad. This is what clogs the tubes – not p2p, or video streaming. It’s the millions of robots sending spam.

Also, I have no clue who are the people who respond to these things. I know a lot of computer illiterate people, but none of them is dumb enough to buy anything from spammers. I think that people who respond to spam should be publicly flogged. ;)

Ah, Spam. I hate it. I wonder how much of worldwide internet traffic is due to this scourge? I hope that we figure out a solution in the next 10 years. Of course, it’s sort of our own fault – spam wouldn’t exist if a certain (small) percent of us didn’t click on spam and buy things from those advertisers.

Captchas? I haven’t seen one of those yet. I hate the bloody things, always give me a headache. I’ve had a couple of comments blocked by WPSpamFree, but I think it may have been because I was reading multiple articles I had in my RSS feed and tried to comment on several different ones too close together.

err… my last post included a typo that completely changed the meaning. I said “but not quite as impressed by the consistency with which you update here.” I meant, “but not as impressive as the consistency with which you update here.” What was supposed to be a compliment turned out horribly wrong :(

You’re right, I never see spam here. I’m really impressed at how much your filters catch, but not quite as impressed by the consistency with which you update here. Thanks for keeping an great blog great for so long!

I saw a spike around the same time, though not as significant. I’m at 99.65% spam, yikes!

Oh whoops, that quote should be entitled “Luke said”.