As of approximatly 6 PM, CST, this blog passed a not-insigificant milestone… our 200,000 auto-spam comment!

Yes, of course it was deleted… and, thanks to the anti-spam software installed by Timmer (all hail, all hail!) sometime around Christmas, none of these disgusting abominations actually sifted through to be posted. But the software includes a spam-o-meter. It was kind of like watching the odometer of the VEV turn over to 200,000. I can vividly recall that moment! It was while I was driving to work at Lackland AFB – On the 90, just a little way east of Wilford Hall… but a little uncertain about the year. Say early fall, 1996, just before I retired from the USAF!

I run my nimble fingers through the moderation queue a couple of times a day, heartlessly emptying them, all these pitifully miss-spelled attempts to look like a chummy, friendly comment, flogging prescription drugs, diverse alternate sexual experiences and perversities, payday loans… and now and again the occassional almost-legitimate looking business or service, which looks almost embarrassed at being caught in such disreputable surroundings.

Really, most of the spam comments are of such resounding stupidity as to make me wonder why on earth they bother. Absolute gibberish with a link to a website flogging pharmaceuticals sent out several hundred times over to the same website isn’t likely to last long enough to garner a link or two… nor is a vaugely complimentary mention of the colors and design of this site, especially if it has been sent about three or four hundred times with the same exact errors in spelling. And a comment larded with a hundred links to assorted pharmaceuticals or sexual kinks… like, if it wouldn’t make it through a Yahoo spam filter, why would it make it through ours?

Anyway, thought I would make a note of this. Carry on with your regularly assigned duties.