Meta: drying out, and slaying the giant spambots

A big chunk of my city is still underwater, but the sun came out this morning. Posting will be sporadic, as I’m working in the mayor’s office all week, answering phones and helping deal with the mess. The last time we had a flood like this, I was covering it for the newspaper, so it’s interesting to see it from the other side, especially as my job includes helping juggle the media, from NPR to my replacement at the local weekly.

Anyway, I’m not sure how obvious this is, but comments on this blog are moderated, sort of. If you are commenting for the first time, I have to approve you. After that, your comments get posted automatically. As our city hall doesn’t have wireless internet, and I don’t have any way to check this e-mail account via the web, new posters will have to be a bit patient. Sorry about that.

My hits have gone way up the past two months, and the amount of comment spam has risen accordingly. About 90 percent of it is for an old post called “Love Manga over and out,” and as it isn’t a particularly profound post, I may delete it or maybe even change the title.

Since the point of comment spam is to increase the spammer’s page rank on Google, I was thinking maybe we bloggers should get together and create our own web page, using all the spammer’s keywords—viagra, hoodia, etc.—and then have everyone link to it so we could boot the splogs off the front page of Google. The keywords wouldn’t be linked to anything, of course, except maybe articles about the folly of buying them over the web. My husband is skeptical, but I wonder if it would work. Just a thought. No charge.

About Brigid Alverson

Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Comic Book Resources, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and Robot 6. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
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One Response to Meta: drying out, and slaying the giant spambots

  1. Eclipse says:

    pssst…I would like to get in contact with you through e-mail regarding something.

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