I’ve been thinking a lot about spam lately. Email, snail mail, comment and other variants. I spend a lot of time managing spam of all kinds. The best management victories have been with email spam.
Email apps seem to have evolved to a point where I can train the app to simply get the mail and throw the spam away as fast as I get it. If some of my personal email gets lost, that is the cost for flushing the shit out as fast as the toilet is full.
I got thinking about the toilet metaphor in relation to comment spam. If a spammer’s setup allows it to shit out spam, then my toilet needs to be large enough to hold it and flush it down.
If I were the badass codeslinger, I’d code up a plugin that did just that and call it Colon Blow. Since I’m not adept at perl or php (did you see how long it took me to get the fucking individual archive pages to display recent entries?) I’d like to suggest to either Jay Allen or Anil Dash or maybe even the entire blogging world despite your platform of choice, to create a comment spam plug-in called Colon Blow that allows a person to simply log the spam, submit it to a powerful anti-spam coalition and flush it without much fuss. In other words, when I get a comment that is questionable, I click a link/button that says, “Yes, This Is Spam. Invoke Colon Blow”. When Colon Blow is invoked, a number of things happen (reporting, deleting from the database and a holistic exorcism on the server), but I don’t see them. And if I choose not to do anything, Colon Blow periodically goes through my database and deletes comments older than a few days that I haven’t declared as spam or approved.
Better yet would be a plug-in that traced the comment spam to the spamming machine’s MAC address and re-routed the spewage right back to that machine, effectively blowing the shit right back at the spammers. That would be killer sweet.
And finally, a note to the comment spammers: You are the spore on the rotting sewage that is oozing through the world’s toilets. I hope you’re happy ruining the holidays for children everywhere and in general, ruining the internet for everyone else.
In a past life I was a second grade teacher.