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The blight of spam

If you use e-mail, you know about spam, or junk mail. Actually, spam is more than just unwanted advertisements for sex-enhancing drugs in your Inbox. Spam is a broad term for any intrusive and irrelevant commercial placed anywhere online. In blogs, spam rears its hideous head mostly in comments and in TrackBacks.

As with e-mail spam,comment spammers and TrackBack spammers are amazingly sophisticated. The best and most prolific of them use automated software that rips through blogs polluting their pages with irrelevant and sometimes disgusting notices. Fighting spam is a significant part of any blogger’s lifestyle, if that person’s blog exists outside a social network. (Social networks can protect their members from spam to a certain extent.) The problem reaches desperate proportions at major blogs, where substantial resources are deployed mounting technology to thwart spambots — and those solutions almost never work perfectly. Many high-profile blogs hopelessly switch off their comments and TrackBack fields, which is a loss to the blogosphere.

Extreme pessimists say that TrackBack has been killed by spam and comments have been assassinated too. But average folks engaging in casual, a vocational blogging are not nearly as troubled by what is often a minor and occasional nuisance.