bloggers | silkannthreades

I dislike clutter, INTENSELY. I create it inadvertently, I put up with it sullenly, and I do try to reduce it, but its advance is relentless. It INVADES, stealthily, despite my best efforts at prevention.

Here’s my kitchen on a clutter day. Some will laugh at my concept of clutter but I have a very low clutter- tolerance; my children will attest to that.Because of my distaste for my own clutter, I try to keep my blog page as simple as possible. This is mostly why you won’t find stats on my page, with one exception. I have a spam counter. I include the spam counter because a) I want to see how bad the spam problem is and b) I want to make a little, daily protest (however feeble and futile) about the scourge of spam.

So, how bad is the spam problem on my blog? Pretty bad, I’d say, but unlikely to be much worse than that experienced by other bloggers. Am I right or am I right? (Please tell me I am right. It would be too embarrassing to find out that I am the only one subjected to spam! ) Since I began blogging last year I have had 2455 real comments and 4098 blocked spam comments. I think that’s not only bad but sad, too. Sad, that spammers, with their illiterate nonsensical blither, out number all the wonderful, genuine people who do comment and communicate on my blog.

But, with spam being cheerily filtered by numerous spam filters, and out of sight most of the time, is there any point in stressing about it, or grizzling about it, or even making a faint little protest about it? Why, yes, I believe there is a point; just a tiny one.

Here’s why: how would you feel if every day, hour after hour, persons unknown, went along your street throwing pamphlets and paper onto the ground and every which way. You could sweep up a few and maybe city street cleaners would sweep up a few more. But, in a very short time, your street would be impassable, unusable, ugly, unbearable and eventually unlivable. And none of those scenarios includes the tremendous waste of resources, natural and human, that would be involved in such an inconsiderate and random pamphlet distribution. Although we can’t see spam in this literal way, this, as I understand it, is what spam does to the internet. It fills up a lovely open internet highway with rubbish; it wastes space and time and deprives us of speed and our ability to use the internet to its full potential. Put another way, spam on the internet is something like dirty oil in your car engine ,or contaminated fuel in your gas tank. It mucks up the works.

How much it can muck up the works was evident earlier this year when a cyber war, related to spam, nearly brought the internet to its knees. Remember this? http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june13/cyberattacks_03-27.html

So, what can we do to mitigate the consequences of spam. Not a lot, l would suggest, but, at the very least, we folk on WordPress can activate our spam counters and out comment, those scummy scammers till they have to hide fearfully on the fringes of the WordPress world. LOL, as if! But, surely, worth a try?