As you may be aware, Blogger has a feature that allows an email to be sent to the owner of a blog whenever a comment is made on any post. It’s a handy feature that allows me to easily stay on top of the lively discussions that take place on this blog. It also allows me to know instantly when someone is using the comments section as a venue for their worthless spam. While my usual policy is not to delete any comments made to the posts in my blogs, the one exception I make is for spam (I would probably delete excessive profanity as well, but thankfully that has not been an issue here). Requiring you to enter a captcha (the distorted text) every time you comment is a bit of a pain, but it makes it pretty much impossible for spammers to use automated methods to spread their worthless garbage. Plus, the rel=nofollow tag in the code makes comment spamming pointless since search engines won’t follow the links anyway. Therefore, usually spam is not much of a problem here.
However, yesterday morning I was quite surprised to find my inbox flooded with over a dozen nearly identical comments—all from the same person—and more flowing by the minute. What was going on? Well, see for yourself in this screenshot of Seattle Bubble comments in my inbox:
Tim Dunn, Realtor, decided that a story that classifies Seattle as a “fair value” was so important that he should manually post it 23 times (only 22 are shown, because one more straggler came in after I took this screenshot). I guess that makes him Tim Dunn, Comment Spammer. Well, in case you’re reading this now, Mr. Dunn, I want to make this absolutely clear: comment spam is not acceptable.
When people come here and argue opposing positions, that’s fine. I don’t even mind if the discussions get a little heated sometimes—that’s natural. But pasting a link (one that we have already talked about, no less) two dozen times is not a discussion, it’s spam.
Because you have abused the open commenting policy, you are no longer welcome here, Tim Dunn, Spammer. If you post again from this point forward, it will be deleted.