Akismet has stopped more than 36,000 spam comments from being posted on my site over the two years I’ve been blogging, a milestone reached yesterday. (Happy anniversary to me!)
I scan through the “holding pen” every once in a while, and usually the spam is obvious. But recently one of the stopped messages took a different approach, boldly promising to “post your promotional message on millions of forums worldwide.” It actually said, “No, this isn’t spam email. It’s penetrating online established communities…” Right, you can generate 400,000 “unique” forum posts, complete with a link to your web site, but it’s not spam. Good luck with that one.
I also ran across something else recently that seemed to be a new form of spam. I was contacted on Facebook by two people I’ve never heard of, wanting to be friends. Here’s a tip. If you want to befriend me and I don’t know you, or it’s been a long time since we’ve encountered each other, write a line explaining where you got my name or where we met and why we should connect. Otherwise, I’m assuming you’re a spammer. Am I wrong?