Some musings on comment spam

This blog has been running for two or three years now (I can’t remember when).  In that time I have written 2,340 posts, which have attracted 6,866 comments, and … 215,300 spam comments!!  That is, an average of 100 spams per post.

Every morning I get a few of them in my inbox, which the spam filter has allowed through, and I have to go off to this site and manually remove them.  That takes time … minutes of my life stolen. 

Yet time is all we have.  We each have a fixed amount of it.  We sell it for money, in order to live, hoping to make something of the rest of our days.  To steal time is to steal life.  Some of my contemporaries at school had much less than they thought, and have already passed on.  How much time each of us has left is something that none of us can know.

100 spam comments, every time I post… that is a sobering amount of trouble, of lost time and nuisance.

I hesitate to ask government to deal with this problem.  Undoubtedly, eventually, access to the web will be controlled.  Only the registered will be allowed on.  That day will not be a good one for freedom, of course.  Will the spammer force us all to acquiesce in allowing weaselly politicans control of the web?

Yet even then spam will continue.  It will continue to arrive, this time from those big businesses with enough links to government to be allowed on the list as being “reputable”.  This is the reason why junk mail pops through our letter boxes every day.  No-one wants it, yet still it comes.

Perhaps we can endure the spammer, and his theft of our lives, then, if there is really no solution. 

UPDATE: It seems that I started blogging on 30th July 2006, at Thoughts on Antiquity (at neonostalgia.com, now seemingly defunct), and began this blog on 9th August 2009.