Ah, how marvelous became my blog's hall of mirrors after TypePad, the hosting service, had the not-so-bright idea to juice up its spam comment filter.
Absolutely legitimate comments got unceremoniously moved into a spam folder, unbeknownst to me and countless other bloggers.
Until the unbeknownst became knowst when I heard from an upset visitor to my other blog asking why I was censoring several of his recent comments.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
But then I logged onto TypePad and saw a mention of how they were thanking people for letting them know that their comment spam filter "upgrade" (better termed a disaster) was filtering over-zealously.
No kidding. Because when I tried to post a comment on one of my posts where most of the excessive filtering had taken place, my own comment about the comment spam problem was marked as comment spam.
Far out. Into the looking glass. A hall of mirrors. I felt like the White Rabbit:
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
Something is wrong, deeply wrong, when the mass of web surfers and bloggers have to put up with so much crap because of a few idiots who get their jollies by leaving inanely obvious pitches for their products on a post.
"Loved what you said. It was great." I then glance at the URL signature and see it's something like www.cheapmortagenow.com , or whatever.
It takes me just a minute or so to delete it, but I shouldn't have to spend even that much time. Or go through the hassle of having my own comment verified as being valid.
I don't understand why invading the privacy of someone's personal computer doesn't carry the same legal penalty as invading someone's personal living space. Because my computer is where I live for much of the day.
Yet S.O.B.s can try to put spyware, adware, spam, viruses, or other crap on my personal computer property when this would be a big no-no if they walked onto my personal home property and attempted the same sort of thing.
Another irritant: some important email messages got flagged as spam by Gmail and languished unnoticed in my account's spam folder for a few days until the sender asked me, "Why haven't you responded to what I sent you?"
Well, because spam filters are so idiotic they flag absolutely innocent messages, while still allowing pitches for Viagra and other "male enhancement" products to enter my inbox daily.
I don't know what the solution is. So I can't really blame TypePad and Gmail for doing what they can, albeit imperfectly, to minimize spam's impact.
Still, when my own comment about spam is marked as spam, that's a sign we're heading toward a cyberspace black hole singularity where everything normal has been sucked into oblivion and the only content on the Internet is warnings about the content on the Internet.
Blogspot has gone through some turmoil also as commenters were supposed to have a Universal ID or couldn't post. Some are leery of such; so comments went way down. Maybe the powers that be are trying to destroy the only media outside their control :)
Posted by: Rain | December 21, 2007 at 08:27 AM