Cross Posted On My Other Blog

Gay Muscle Penis and Akismet Spam

One of the nice features of WordPress is the ability to catch spam comments and put them in a sort of limbo state for my approval or deletion. Very rarely are any of these comments allowed through to the legitimate comment section. A while back, I activated comment moderation, in which every comment written about one of my topics will never go directly to a post. I must approve it first. This way, nothing pornographic or meaningless gets through.

In my capacity as administrator of this blog I can add words to be blacklisted and I can limit the amount of hyperlinks allowed for all incoming comments. This is a great method of screening out the rot. Many of these comments have a dozen or so links to all sorts of back alley websites. Unfortunately, sometimes a good, legitimate comment gets stuck there, too. Even worse for me, is that I have to scroll through each and every one of those comments to weed out the good from the bad. Every once in a while, I find a good one. Sometimes I miss, for which I apologize.

I can understand a correlation between most of these spam comments and some of my posts. A good example of this is my category on diabetes. Because of medical terminology and descriptions of assorted prescription drugs and supplements, I get thousands of spam content for Viagra, Propecia, Oxycontin, Crestor and a slew of other drugs. I can understand how spam spiders find me through words I have written and somehow expect me to publish the garbage they have sent in from the dark corners of the globe. Trust me, I can get upwards of a thousand a day and if I don't have time to search through all of them, that's where the good guy gets lost. I delete them all.

What puzzles me the most, though, is where do the porn ones fit in? What links them to me? I have never written anything pornographic on this blog. I know, once they latch on to you, they will sink every decayed tooth into you and that may explain it somehow. I remember, a while back, I wrote a piece about a silly watch purchase I made many, many years ago. A Hamilton watch, or what I thought was one, turned out to be a "Harmilton." OK, that helps explain why I still get those persnickety "Counterfeit Rolex" spams, but why porn? Even if I was gay, why would I be interested in "Gay Muscle Penis" which further insults by including tons of links to "porn babes" and "naked and nude underage nymphets?" Let's not forget those "tender, puffy nipples," gay guys, as if that would interest you.

Before I retired for the night, I threw out over a hundred spams. This morning, I woke up, powered up the laptop, went to my site and found over 200 comments caught in Akismet. What is the logic behind these comments? They are never going to be published. Maybe, these entities assume all WordPress users are stupid, but I seriously doubt it. I think they solely do it to aggravate the living crap out of us.