that canadian girl

According to Spamhaus, over 96% of all email is spam. That leaves 2% for Facebook notifications, 1.5% for those forwards your mum sends you that you saw in 2001 anyways & about 0.5% for those nagging emails your boss sends on Sunday nights. It’s grim isn’t it? Yet we love it, and we (certainly I) couldn’t live without it.

How about blog comments?

We love getting recognition and fandom for the great entries we write, even though we might not get as many as the big blogs who might get a few hundreds for every post written! And how much spam in blogs? Well, according to Akismet, who power the spam filtering for WordPress and Movable Type blogs, 85% of all blog comments are spam.

Recently, however, I’ve noted a slightly disturbing trend where bloggers let some spam comments through by choice. I’m mystified on why they would do this; ignorance that spammers can “customise” a spam message by including your post title and therefore assuming it’s real? Naivety that a comment like “I was searching for Blogs about personal government grant applications and found this site. I am interested in your content and appreciate sites like this.” could be a real one? Or a personal interest in wanting to see their posts appear to have more comments?

Others seem to simply hit “delete” instead of “spam” in their WordPress admin area, since the immediate results are the same.

But here is why it matters

It’s important for us all to call a spade a spade and a spam comment a spam comment.

Akismet is more than just a spam filter for YOUR blog, it’s a giant brain. Not the gooey, kept-in-a-jar kind of brain, don’t worry. (Though I wouldn’t put it past Matt Mullenweg to have one of those too…)

It’s a system that learns from all our actions, so every comment you mark helps it identify ham from spam in the future on your blog, but also on every other Akismet user’s blog. So marking a commenter you don’t like as “spam” or a spam comment as “deleted” muddles the waters. Bet you didn’t realise it affected everyone else, did you?

Follow these simple rules

• If it’s a real comment from a squishy human user but you don’t agree with it, hit delete.
• If it’s a comment from a bot, something that looks automatically generated or links to obvious spam sites, hit spam.

Being consistent with these rules will allow us all to spend more time blogging and less time moderating comments. Meanwhile, if you haven’t got Akismet already enabled on your blog, what are you waiting for?

[Image: Bucket and Spades by Auntie P on Flickr, under Creative Commons]

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

[Update: Some further info on the post on Michele Neylon's blog. Monster PR? Get on this one like a fat kid on a smartie now!]

Tom Raftery posted yesterday to let the world know that Monster.ie doesn’t quite grasp the concept of the DPA (Data Protection Act) which covers personal data like email addresses.

This morning one of it@cork’s members forwarded us an email conversation he had with John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland. We were incredulous when we read it.

It started with an email from Monster’s John Burns to 189 recipients and CC’d to our member (!). Our member replied to John that this was spam and

…coming from Monster, most unprofessional. Worse, you exposed everyone’s email address to one another without their permission

Unbelievably for someone working in an online organisation, Monster’s John Burns seems to be unaware of the data protection legislation and responded to this saying:

These email addresses are part of a networking list from www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.

I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)

Having worked in email marketing before and being rather precious about my personal data (well… aside from the fact that I publish just about everything aside from my bra size on my blog!), shit like this winds me up a treat.

Some people don’t mind having to wade through piles of junk mail just to get to the important stuff, but it doesn’t give them permission to do the same to everyone else.

The Data Protection Act specifically requires a sender to have explicit permission from a user before mailing them, which is basic common sense anyways. But what I find absolutely gobsmacking, if I’ve understood the above correctly, is that he put 189 recipients in the “To” field. When anyone dares send me mail like that without making all recipients “Bcc”, it makes me want to do unspeakable things to them. I haven’t even received the email, yet it’s making me want to get my ass kicking boots on and go visit Johnny over in Ireland.

Urgh, some people just shouldn’t have access to the Internet, much less be involved in running an online business like Monster!

[Via Paul Walsh @ Segala & his twitter comment]