Evil spammers waste our time.

I got an email from one of our regular commenters, a nice guy who contributes to our blog discussions when not busy at his day job. He wrote a comment that did not show up on the blog, and emailed me:

This is not at all important, but since something similar happened recently I wonder if something is up with your comment form.

I explained that the blog has a spam filter that catches hundreds of items per day, so many that it’s impossible to go through them and check for legitimate comments. If you email and tell me you have a comment that didn’t show up, I can search through the spam folder for your name and approve the comment. In this case I found one of this guy’s comments but not the other, as I’d emptied the spam folder a few days earlier.

Also every day we get a few comments that are in some intermediate state—not approved and not going straight into spam, they’re held in the main comment folder waiting for me to decide whether to approve them or send them into spam. About half of these are legit and about half are spam, for example here’s one that recently came in:

Was looking for some takes regarding this topic and I found your article quite informative. It has given me a fresh perspective on the topic tackled. Thanks!

This one’s obviously spam. Other times the comment seems to have been written by a computer program that pulls phrases from the post or from published comments, or maybe it’s an actual human who’s trying to write a comment that will be approved. In this case the commenter had a link to a homemade site selling some crap. The only thing I don’t know is if it’s written by the site owner in a desperate attempt to get some web traffic, or if he paid some sleazy online company to promote his site, and this is what they’ve come up with.

In any case, it’s horrible, not just cos it wastes my time but also because it creates the conditions under which a fun and serious legitimate commenter can’t always get through. Not the worst thing going on, just annoying vandalism. Can’t these people find some better things to do, like publishing fake psychology studies, going on NPR, and giving Ted talks?