FOB

I found out a few days ago that my brother gets literally 1000 spams a day. I was kind of shocked. My two email accounts (which aggregate perhaps 10 different forwarders) probably get a total of 20-40 spams per day. Suddenly that doesn't seem so bad.

I can't understate my hatred and disgust for spammers, a category in which I include phone spammers and postal spammers as well as email spammers. Ethically, I think it's the lowest kind of behavior. Spammers prey upon the weakest people in society—purchasers of their products are hugely disproportionately the mentally ill, especially elderly folks with Alzheimer's. Further, their racket is based entirely on taking advantage of the goodness of the general public. We could stop spam tomorrow by simply refusing all initiation of contact from folks we don't know, but most of us aren't willing to live like that. Spammers work hard to poison our most valuable communications resources for their own usually minuscule benefit…

A long time ago (maybe 12 years, maybe more?) I signed up with a startup called mail.com, which promised free email forwarding for life. I started to use that as my primary email, since I was moving around a lot. Turns out they lied—they closed my account after a couple of years, saying in effect "what are you going to do, sue us?" They were right, I wasn't going to. So I moved my email to bigfoot.com…

Several really productive people spent most of their day today cleaning up porn link spam at the various PSU CS wikis…

Perhaps I've squashed the spammers at FOB for the moment…

I'm afraid I've once again turned off anonymous commenting on this site. (Actually, Josh Triplett did the turn-off and clean-up. Thanks hugely, Josh!)

Apparently some poker site spammers flooded FOB with garbage this evening. As a result, I can't really take anonymous comments anymore.

I'd love to have suggestions as to alternatives: just email fob@po8.org. The ones I am currently considering are some kind of better account creation mechanism for folks who want to comment, or captchas. Either is a pain for me to implement and administer, and will probably require completing my upgrade of the Drupal bits here. Neither will be 100% effective in solving the problem.

Over the years, I've twice had friends become involved in spamming operations. I was pretty hard on them. In retrospect, not nearly hard enough, though. The spammer is one of the lowest forms of human life. May every spammer develop a conscience, then die of shame.

Excellent. I've got a total of about 10 legitimate outside comments over the whole time this blog has been up. A few weeks ago, I made it possible to comment anonymously. Today, some pathetic excuse for a human being spammed advertising comments onto the head entry on the site 4 times. So it's spammers 4, good folks 10. Could be worse, I guess…