locussolus - A word from your sponsor

November 11, 2003

So I'm finally starting to get some comment spam, mostly from evil pharmaceutical companies in response to this post. I haven't decided whether to use some kind of prophylactic software, but I'd be grateful for any suggestions/referrals.

The strangest thing though is that some of the spam seems to be coming from the FDA, or at least from someone who wants to publicize it... wtf?

Comments

BigOldGeek {November 11, 2003}

Now that the word "Viagra" is in your blog's comments, I'd expect your pagerank to soar. Weird, man.

ogged {November 11, 2003}

This is what most people (Unfogged included) are using, and it seems to work pretty well.

http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/

paul {November 12, 2003}

thanks ogged... I'm looking into that.

One other thing I find interesting about this is that I think the advertisements are working... I don't mean the Viagra ads, because I already know about Viagra and what it does, but the others: I had never heard of Apidex before, and I still don't know what it does, but I now know the name. Whenever I encounter it later on, whether I remember where I saw it or not, I will know the name already, and I certainly can't say it won't influence me.

This is contrary to my intuition about these things, which is that this kind of spamming wouldn't work, that it would have the opposite effect because folks who read blogs would be disgusted by it. But if all you care about is name recognition, spam is definitely a way to go.