ankurb

…and then, some MORE spam! Hell, that’s what’s been happening to my blog. I just keep getting an irritating 70kb long anonymous comment daily full of links to adult sites, colleges, warez sites and whatnot. Plus with Blogger crawling like a tortoise, it’s a pain in the ass to get these big comments deleted.

The most irritating thing is that although I use CAPTCHA, image verification, for my blog comments, I always end up getting spam. I tried unsuccessfully by removing it to see what happens, and it simply opened the spam floodgates. And you know what, there are so MANY blogs around, that I visit, that DON’T keep image verification enabled, and still end up getting no spam…!!!

Maybe it has something to with the fact that 75% of my blog’s visitors come via search engines, so maybe spam bots find my blog a ‘tasty’ target. No offence meant to Hormel Foods Inc…

I think I’m not the only one to notice this, but of late, Blogger.com has been really slow, and when I say that I mean a pace which would make an insomniac sloth fall off to sleep. Posts take too long to publish, comments appear late, changes made take a loooooooong time to get republished etc etc. Guess Blogger’s a victim of its own success, with so many of the blogosphere being on it.

However, things like spam blogs, where bots churn out kilobytes of trash are things which really bog down Blogger’s resources. Also, Blogger’s policy of not deleting inactive blogs may sound nice, but in the long run it really hurts users. I’ve seen so many blogs which just to have a few, sometimes just one, post since say 2004 and they still exist. There should be a limit to how nice they should try to act, because in the end, real users like me suffer. It makes financial sense for them too to purge their databases of stuff nobody bothers to read anyway and which are no longer being updated.

It’s also the duty of Blogger users not to create empty blogs with one post or something. It’s a free lunch around here, so be kind to your host…