On non-specific comments and spam

There seems to be an increasing trend by marginal companies to attempt to advertise their presence by automatically spamming comments out to blog posts. I got one series of such bogus comments that had been added to almost a dozen past posts simultaneously. If you are writing a blog, you may be flattered when some comment comes in praising your posts, but in fact the commentator is not a real person but is merely a program advertising a product and the program is frequently unable to write coherent English sentences.

I review every comment before it is posted to my blogs. Unless I happen to know the commentator, I will delete any non-specific comment before publication. You will have to excuse me, if in the past, I have deleted your heart-felt praise for my work, but unless you include something specific about the post that makes sense, I will summarily delete your comment and any associated fines. I did get a malware email the other day that managed to instal a Trojan Horse file on my computer before I could delete it. Fortunately, my next line of defense took over and advised me that the spam comment had been posted and where it was located and the bad file was deleted.

How do I know the comment is malware? Usually there is a dead giveaway if the comment is made to a very old post and contains a reference to an unrelated website such as a real estate office or some other business. It is not necessary that the comment contain a link, the fact that the name of the business is spread into a lot of websites is what they are trying to achieve.

So, if you are making a comment, be specific. Be sure to mention something from the post. If you are writing a blog, be sure and at least review every comment before it is posted and if there is a way, which there is, to prevent the comments from being automatically posted, use the programs. Of course, the simple way to prevent auto-posts is to require the recognition of an image file before posting, but I like to look at the comments, bad or good, because sometimes I get some good topics out of the comments.