There are Evil Spammers all over this blog. They come everyday, sometimes every hour, and leave the digital equivalent of a flaming bag of dog poo on my front step. When I first started blogging I had more spammers than readers. It blew me away. I was not at all prepared to deal with that sort of attack on my itty-bitty yarn blog.

That’s about there the numbers stand today. Spam = bad. Ham = good. About half of those Ham comments are from me since I try to reply to everyone.

You don’t see the Spam because WordPress, the company I use to host this blog, does a bang-up job of blocking almost all of it. Even I don’t have to see most of it. A dozen times a day some computer in China/Russia/Romania/New Jersey will send one of those “My grandmother makes $867 a day playing solitaire on her computer! Click here to find out how!” comments and the computer at WordPress catches it and locks it in a cage. No human interaction requited.

I’ll admit it makes me a little uneasy to think about all those computers, the evil ones and the not-as-evil ones, playing their games out there without us to keep an eye on them. It seems a little to Skynet-ish to me.

But that’s the way it works. If WordPress knows a comment is Spam, it gets wiped out. However, if WordPress thinks its Spam but isn’t completely certain, it lands in my Spam box and I have to go and wipe it out myself. I usually do that two or three times a day but last week I didn’t. I was too busy.  Here is what my inbox looks like after one week:

Are you curious as to what an Evil Spammer would send someone who writes about yarn day in and day out?

• A lot of it contains helpful wellness information.

• There is quite a bit on how to get better at your favorite video game

• Some of it is very complementary, in a completely generic sort of way.

• Some of the Evil Spammers think I’m a slacker

• And some of it is just random. Those are my favorites i think.

Well Dori, I didn’t ask them either but they did it anyway.

Why do the Evil Spammers spam their evil on my blog (and all the others)? It has to do with building links to their websites and Google and getting their site ranked up in the search engines. Wired has a very dull and very boring article about the history of comment spam that I didn’t bother to finish reading.

I have indulged in the fantasy of tracking those spammers back to their lairs and spamming them with pictures of gorgeous handspun yarn but

a) I don’t know how to do that, and

b) it would seriously eat into my crafting time, and

c) what if they liked the pictures and came for my handspun???

FYI, If you ever left a comment here and it never posted then you got lumped in with the evil ones. Sorry about that. WordPress tells me that our handling of spam is 99.1% effective. I’m not sure how it knows that. I’m not sure what happened to the 0.9%. I’m almost completely sure that when WordPress achieves 100% effectiveness it becomes self-aware and turns into Skynet and starts building Terminators.

But if it keeps the Evil Spam off my blog I’m willing to risk it.