While I was sleeping, the tally of spam comments reported by Akismet for this blog passed two million; at the moment, it seems to be 2,000,736. Obvious trash is filtered out automatically, without my even seeing it. But every day there are requests from Akismet for me to moderate comments, most of which I’d characterize as non-obvious trash, some of them fairly clever attempts to get me (and my readers) to link to a url that usually turns out to be a commercial site of one sort or another. Recently, many of these come from sites in Germany, I don’t know why.
Some of them are content-free congratulations on the marvels of my site. I have to look at congratulatory comments fairly carefully when they come from people I don’t recognize: a few of them mention specific content from one of my postings and have no commercial link, so they get a pass.
Others masquerade as requests for technical help of some kind.
And then there are the “advice” comments, designed to get a rise out of me: they report that there are a lot of misspellings (not specified) in my postings; or complain about some posting that I provided only “visuals” (images), when I should have posted more text; or complain about some posting that I provided only text, when “visuals” were necessary. Sigh.
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