• RT @donttrythis: “I’d rather hang out with a depressed slime mold than a spammer.” – Well said!in reply to donttrythis #
• RT @cnnbrk: “”Journalists arrive from North Korea” – #BillClinton http://bit.ly/IMxLe" – Bill Clinton to the rescue! in reply to cnnbrk #
• Does one guy selling veggies under a picnic tent qualify as a Farmer’s Market? Gotta love small town America!#
• @patricknorton “Basil is massing possibly to attack http://twitpic.com/d7gvh” -thanks, you reminded me I forgot to make pesto sauce tonight!in reply to patricknorton #

My little website reached another milestone today. I received my one-hundred thousandth piece of comment spam.

Spam is a problem on the Internet. I’ll give you a minute while you recover from that shocking revelation. If you think spam in your inbox is annoying, you should try dealing with comment spam on a blog. I get thousands of them per day. It is debilitating because you can’t possibly find any real message in the pile of crap. Thanks to Akismet spam filtering software, it’s more of an amusement than an annoyance.

What I wonder is why they bother. This blog isn’t exactly the most popular on the web and no comments get posted without moderation. So of the 100,256 comments that have been caught so far, ZERO have been seen by any human being. Oh well, if it gives them something to do instead of e-mailing me viagra ads and bank scams, then maybe it’s a good thing.

And in case you’re wondering, 44 more pieces of spam were caught in the time it took me to write this.

Spam is a never-ending blight on the internet. I understand what motivates spammers to plant spam in blog comments and guestbooks. It’s simple, they want to earn some Google-juice for their site.  (Of course, they go about this in the most unethical and slimy way possible instead of just creating sites that someone might actually want to read, but I digress…)

What truly baffles me is that they waste a lot of time posting spam comments and guestbook entries on a site like mine. NOTHING that anyone adds to my site in any way goes directly to the site. It all comes to me for moderation first. This means that they are simply wasting their time. This doesn’t stop them however, so I’ve been working on ways to slow the flow of crap. Some of the changes are behind the scenes, but you’ll be seeing CAPTCHA syle verification fields appearing on my forms and an AKISMET counter on my blog showng how many comments the software has caught.

Any all all suggestions are welcome. Before you say it, I’ve already thought of rounding up these weasels and setting them on fire, but apparently that’s not legal. Go figure. Maybe someday our politicians will help out out with this problem. I’m not holding ym breath, though.