When Timmer upgraded the site to a newer version of Word Press, he also installed the Akismet spam-killing option, which keeps a running tally of spam comments intercepted and deleted. This is actually kind of amusing, because at current rates of accumulation, I believe we will have deleted 100,000 individual spam comments by New Years’ Day… none of which have actually posted.

I scroll through the pages of spam occasionally— like when there is only a hundred or so—just to make sure that there are no legitimate comments stranded there, and a depressing chore that is, too. Multiple identical, ungrammatical or just plain gibberish comments, with a link to a website embedded somewhere out the wilds of the internet.
Lots of kinky sexual practices, porn that to judge from the title line tends toward the disgusting side of the scale, boatloads of dubious drugs, a scattering of payday loan sites, insurance, and of late, a couple of sites that push ready-made term papers. A depressing collection of topics, and even more depressing is that it was probably less trouble for the originators to send it all out than it is for me to delete it all.

100,000 of these, all dumped on one site… none of which were actually posted. I presume there must be blogs somewhere out there with an unwary or careless administrator, where such comments do get posted and stay up, and presumably serve as free advertising, but probably not many. I suppose the spam-scum sending out this huge quantity of comments must get one or two links somewhere, and that must make it all worth while. But it’s kind of depressing… it’s the marketing equivalent of carpeting an entire town with spray-paint graffiti over every imaginable surface; walls, windows, other billboards, fences and retaining walls, all advertising some nasty sort of pawn-pornshop on the bad side of town. Even if all of it is swiftly and magically scrubbed away, a dozen times a day, I still resent the effort of having to do it. I loath everyone involved: the spammers who repeat this pointless exercise several hundred times daily, and doing it very badly, their disgusting clients with their rip-off business plan, and their schlubby loser clients. I hope they all get disgusting diseases, that their servers crash, and their pets all bite them. Bah, humbug, spam-scum… I wish a Merry Christmas for everyone else in the world but you.

So, taking bets on when we will get the magic 100,000; when will we cross the magic threshold?