Bubbles in the Bathtub

If you haven't run into it yet, count yourself lucky. Essentially these are all of the little messages advertising popular drugs, pornography, and any number of other things that get posted to online bulletin boards, mailing lists and weblogs.

There are a multitude of online forums and mailing lists that have gone fallow because their members could not cope and were overrun with comment spam. Those of you on the CTURTLE listserv may recall earlier this year when some person or persons started posting offensive material to the list. The list did not shut down, but the list managers were forced to switch to moderated mode, which requires significantly more time to manage than an unmoderated list. So aside from the pure offensive nature of the material, a certain amount of functionality is lost, and more time (which equals money) is required to keep things going.

Why are people doing this? It's unlikely that they think this is an effective method of advertising (at least directly). Most likely they do it to increase the rank of their web links in many of the large search engines. For example, when you run a search on google the results are returned in particular order, which is partially a function of the number of times each returned link appears on other web sites.

For example, if you do a search for "sea turtle" on google, you will get a list of sea turtle related websites with seaturtle.org about 5 links down. Given that seaturtle.org has more sea turtle content than probably any other site in the world (the MTN alone has 2,162 pages of pure, unadulterated sea turtle info; seaturtle.org as a whole consists of more than 5,400 pages), this might seem like a surprising result. However, for a variety of reasons, the sites listed above seaturtle.org probably have more "other" sites linking to them. Perhaps I am not doing as good a job of marketing seaturtle.org as I should?

OK, so why am I writing about comment spam now? Comment spam has been an intermittent problem on the weblogs on seaturtle.org since they first launched. Fortunately there are a number of utilities available that help keep an eye out for and deal with the spam comments. Unfortunately it's not so easy to block them altogether. With the proper tools it takes me just a minute or two to flush bad comments out once I identify them. Either way, unless you are one of the blog authors, hopefully you have never noticed these comments because I get rid of them as fast as I can.

So, this weekend some industrious scoundrel successfully posted several hundred spam comments in a matter of a few minutes using some automated software. And as far as I am concerned, the people that write the software that enables this sort of thing are even worse scum than those that actually send out the spam. Normally I might consider something like that to be the price of doing business on the internet, but most of these posts included links to porn sites. Particularly offensive given that there are quite a few minors that use seaturtle.org. Not only is what these people are doing just plain wrong (it takes away from the time I have to develop new content for seaturtle.org), it is also offensive, and probably illegal (or should be).

Be that as it may, I would like to apologize to all of the weblog authors on seaturtle.org who put up with this kind of garbage. I hope you will continue to blog and continue to keep your comments open. I feel very strongly about keeping the seaturtle.org weblogs open to comments (even though the sea turtle community doesn't seem to post many). 1) closing comments is essentially giving in to the scum of the web and, 2) free discussion and exchange of ideas is one of the beauties of the weblogs. To this end, I have upgraded the spam filters and added a new authentication step to the process of posting comments. That should at least keep out the mass postings. As with e-mail spam, it is likely impossible to keep it all out. Every time you come up with something to block them, the spammers come up with new tricks to get around your blocks. Honest netizens are left to play catch-up with those that would abuse the free and open nature of the internet for their own personal gain.

Finally, a note to all comment spammers. If you post to this site you better make sure that you cover your tracks. If you do not, I WILL IDENTIFY YOU and I WILL REPORT YOU TO ALL APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES, including but not limited to your ISP, your local police and the FBI. You have been warned.