“The world is not a poorer place because those people are dead. It’s one less car on the road. It’s a little less noise and menace.”
Tom Ripley in “Ripley’s Game”
Update: As of 2013/03/29 I have reactivated them again — I’m trying out a few other protection measures.
Hmmm, another meta-posting — once a blog has a certain amount of readers, spam really becomes a problem. As I woke up this … ‘morning’ (hey, it’s a weekend ;-)), I noticed yet again that next to some interesting eMails were computer generated spam comments that got through my spam filter. And frankly, I don’t want to start my days this way any more.
It has become a regular nuisance — I love the written word, and I hate to see it misused. Such a scripting file here makes me angry and sick to my stomach. And to make matters worse, it also costs me time. Sure, deleting them is easy, but it still costs a moment of time and concentration. Even a second is too much for a human being to deal with computer generated spam. And it adds up to more than a second. Randall Munroe’s xkcd chart comes in very handy here — I guess it takes me about a minute a day, because these eMails appear on multiple devices (deleting is also synced, but still, it takes a moment after opening them), I visit my wordpress installation to delete them there (also only a few taps), and because I am annoyed. All in all, perhaps a minute a day, which ends up being one whole day in five years.
On the other hand, I really, really do not want to lose the comments and questions you write. The comments are usually highly motivating, the questions have frequently led me to interesting ideas and postings which might have benefited other readers.
So I’m trying out something different. As forms unfortunately draw spam, I’m switching to eMail and Twitter. I don’t have facebook (don’t like the way facebook deals with privacy — or rather ignores it), nor do I use Google+ (same problem, different organization). But pretty much everyone has eMail and many have Twitter — we’ll see how it goes. If everything works out the last two hours of work have saved me 22 hours in the next five years — and given me the energy to create something interesting, while still receiving your comments and questions.
You find more information on how to contact me on the “Comments & Questions” page.
