Still here, I guess, and so are the spammers

Wow, I haven’t posted for a long time, I guess I have nothing to say publicly, at least not using my real name! Yes, I do post elsewhere under the alias that I’ve used for something like 7 or more years now, but posting under a real name seems, somehow, different. I’m under no illusions of anonymity, however, I’m quite certain the government knows precisely who I am and the alias I post under, with the NSA and alleged telephone eavesdropping that’s been under some, ahem, fire.

I just found that Contact was still sending email to the old email address of the now disconnected ISP I used to use, but I thought I had changed it. I sure hope that nobody tried to email me—never mind that nobody has used the Contact button in all the months that it’s been on this site. So if you tried to email me in the last month or two, sorry(!), I never received it.

On an unrelated note, “U.S. scientists say the more consumers are absorbed in the narrative flow of a story, called transportation, the less likely they’ll respond well to ads.” I wonder if this means when person is caught up in the narritive flow of life in ‘the now’ moment surrounding them, that they won’t respond well to ads? If so, then marketers would logically concentrate upon the future and what could be, instead of what actually is, because reaility is part of the narrative unfolding of each moment with respect to each individual’s life. This seems to explain the so-common culture of ‘denial of reality.’

Have we been indoctrinated, perhaps starting when we are young and continuing through all of our individual years, by a media and various supporting societal structures and culture, to always be ‘looking forward’ or ‘preparing ourselves’ for some illusory world to come, instead of the world we’re actually in right now?

Has the world been hijacked by slick marketers?

While in this blog’s control area, I noticed that in the last few days 239 spams advertising all sorts of drugs piled up. It seems that the spammers are targeting blogs that appear inactive, but that has probably always been true; what seems odd is that they aren’t bugging my partner’s blog much, no more than one or two a day, and she posts every couple of weeks or so.

Why would spammers be avoiding more active blogs? They don’t want to upset the non-abandoned blogs’ users, but if it’s been abandoned, then hey, who cares? Seems as likely as any other answer, if there is an answer.

Note of 6/21: Spammers are still hammering on the door, so perhaps they’re not targeting inactive instead of active blogs.

Note of 8/22: While it’s not the source of the increased spam, the real-time blacklist (DNSRBL) opm.blitzed.org has ceased operations, and that would explain the massive increase of spam: the timeline seems about right.

One thought on “Still here, I guess, and so are the spammers

  1. I just added the Spam Karma footer that reflects the spam statistics. Spam has really soared since the original posting. I still wonder why the total spam number started spiking so much a few months ago. Perhaps this modest, relatively inactive blog is being targeted for special treatment?

    As of today, it says 11665 spams, and 22 legitimate comments. That means that for every single legitimate comment, there’s been 530+ spam comments on average!

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