Well, the spammers have finally gotten to me.

Even though I have Akismet and have taken all sorts of precautions in my htaccess file to block spammers from my blog, I still get dozens of spams a day easily and always have to look through them for the occasional false positive.

So, I’ve had it. I’m switching my blog to require registration in order to comment. It sucks that I’m making you sign up for yet ANOTHER place… I really wanted to leave the blog more open to encourage interaction and discourse. But the spammers are pissing me off. I’ve even seen spam recently from some people I know.

I could write an entire post on this, but I wish people would think more about how annoying it is for a “real” blog owner (as opposed to automated junk blogs not intended for real reading or enjoyment) to have to wade through comment & trackback spam, before firing off their automated spam scripts that are mostly unsuccessful anyway. I know an awful lot of marketers who employ web and blog spam as an everyday tool in their business, and I know that it “works” to whatever degree. But just because something works, does that mean it’s a good thing to do?

I haven’t done any mass web spam type stuff in a couple years. I’m fascinated by automation and so I do play with technologies that can be used for these purposes, but I refrain from using them in my business because I’m also on the receiving end of what they do, and I don’t like it. If I don’t like it done to me, why would I do it to anyone else?

End of rant. Sorry again for making you register. I’m afraid the quantity of comments on this blog is about to drop to near zero. 🙁

Jonathan