Spam police
Today I received a comment on my web design blog complaining that a previous comment was “clearly spam”. The post in question talked about web design books I was looking forward to seeing. And the (possibly spammy) commenter linked to an ebook he was looking forward to.
My question is: what makes this spam? The fact that he bolded the title of the book? The fact that he included a link to the ebook’s web page? The fact that he didn’t say “I am not the author, I just like this book” or something equally obsequious?
Actually, I have two questions:
- Why is it so important that you report this spammer by posting crap to my comments? Have you never heard of email?
- And what made this comment so annoying to you, but the many “I love this article! Thanks for posting. URL” comments don’t cause you to report them as spam?
Two days ago, I got another spam report for my web design forums complaining about a post where the person linked to their web page.
Okay, this might very well be spam. But…
The poster was asking for feedback on his site. You can’t very well request feedback without including a URL. Yes, his signature then included the URL again, but holy crap people, just because people include their URL for their web design business in their sig doesn’t make them a spammer!
I used to respond to these submissions, thanking the spam police officer for his/her diligence and asking what made the post seem spammy to them. But I have never once had one of them reply to me. So now I just delete them.
I like to think that I’m growing as a person by deleting the police reports without responding. But it’s probably just laziness…