I will go root away the noisome weeds which without profit suck the soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. – William Shakespeare, Richard II (III, iv)
Nothing in this sublunary world can be perfect; every pleasure has its price, every rose its thorn, every joy its pang. Those who win lotteries often find themselves plagued by beggars and opportunists, and over every throne hangs a Damoclean sword. So while I’m very pleased with the great success of my blog, it also carries a cost: though I’m visited by several thousand good readers every day, people who are here to learn and explore and share their knowledge and opinions, I am also increasingly targeted by parasites eager to draw some of that traffic to their own sleazy commercial sites.
I have nothing against advertising, as long as it represents itself as such and makes fair payment for the space and time it occupies. It was advertising that first made broadcast radio and television feasible and supported it for most of a century, and a well-designed commercial can be just as entertaining as any other short film; I have voluntarily featured several on this blog without compensation because I enjoyed them and thought y’all might as well. But comment spam is as different from Mr. Bingle as violent assault is from massage; though they are both technically forms of advertising, comment spam is boring, inane, deceptive and attempts to steal attention rather than offering fair compensation for it. As I said in “Parasites”,
…this plague…pours into popular blogs every day like a veritable river of leeches…the Akismet program monitors all comments and shunts spam into a folder for later review and discard; it’s extremely rare that it misses one, but even that goes into the moderation queue where I can catch it and throw it back into the spam folder. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s sometimes too aggressive and mistakes legitimate comments (even from regular posters) for spam, I would simply empty the folder without looking at it because scanning the contents of that folder now takes up a measurable fraction of my time here…72% of all attempted comments over the life of the site have been spam, which will give you some idea of how repellent and uninviting the comment threads would be if they got through.
As of this writing, that fraction is now 83% total, and on any given day the ratio of spam to real comments sometimes exceeds 10:1. One recent afternoon I closed my browser, went to town, came home, cooked and ate dinner and then signed back in to find that Akismet had trapped 100 spam comments in just over five hours; if that becomes typical (as I fear is inevitable) I will soon see over 500 spam comments per day.
Clearly, something has to give, and I’m afraid that something has to be my scanning the spam folder for the rare legitimate comment which Akismet mistakenly discards. Effective immediately, I will no longer browse this mountain of rubbish before clearing it away, so if there’s anything in there which shouldn’t be I won’t be able to see it unless I’m specifically advised that it’s there. Instead of emptying the spam every time I go to the dashboard (as I have done since the beginning), I will instead empty it only once per day, just before I go to bed around midnight Central Time (6:00 UTC). If you try to post a comment and it doesn’t appear as it usually does, here’s what you need to do:
1) If you’re a regular commenter, please click on this link to send me a specially-marked email so I’ll know I have to go digging through the trash for your comment. Please don’t ignore this; once one of your comments is rejected, for all I know Akismet may mark you as a spammer and trash everything you try to post from then on.
2) If you’ve never posted before, it’s extremely likely that your comment is simply being held for moderation and will appear as soon as I notice it (usually within a few hours, but remember I’m in bed between 6:00 and 14:00 UTC). If it doesn’t appear in that time, please click on this link to contact me; make sure you give me a rough idea of when you tried to post so I’ll know when to look. If your comment is insulting, rude, dishonest or trollish it may be that I was the one who excluded it rather than Akismet; you may want read “How Not To Get Your Comments Posted” to see if you followed the instructions properly.
As I said in “House Rules” way back when, 96% of you will probably never have to worry about any of this; however, I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide some remedy to the actions of an over-enthusiastic robot. I value my readers and your comments, and though I don’t have the time or inclination to sift garbage on a several-times-daily basis any more, I certainly don’t mind dumpster diving if I know there’s something valuable in there.
Okay, I gotta ask — that last picture, is that you?
No – Mag’s ankles are thinner than hers. Then again – it took me a couple of minutes to notice because I was looking at something else. 😀
I also never wear that kind of trousers or boaty pumps. That is, I believe, a still from the movie Secretary, which means that bottom half belongs to a different Maggie (Gyllenhaal, to be precise).
OMG I can’t believe I sorta said Maggie Gyllenhaal had thick ankles? “Secretary” is one of my favorite movies of all time! I think she and James Spader brought the whole sub/dom thing into the main stream!
Well, by the picture, those are thick ankles. Given I don’t judge by one attribute, it makes no difference in attractiveness. The sum not the parts; the sum of physical attributes often being a synergy. Add intellect, wit, and maturity, as well sex drive, and thick ankles, flat butt, or sagging breasts, have no meaning in the attractiveness of a women. I assume nor in a man, though the criteria differs.
It’s so much easier to write a blog using a Cyrillic alphabet language 🙂 There is this nice plugin which allows comments only if they have at least 1 Cyrillic character in them. So spam-bots cannot even post in English. There are the Russian spam bots of course, however another nice plugin checks comments for unique Russian letters and bans them. So my Akismet actually has very little work to do.
I realize this does not help you in any way – I just wanted to brag 🙂
I hope it never gets so bad as to make you stop writing. Your posts always make me think and I’ve learned a lot from reading your them (I read for a long time before even thinking of posting and still haven’t read it all – but now I think I will just follow links to referenced previous posts to catch up). Many thanks for your work.
The weekly links columns now contain an “archives” section which should be very helpful in catching up. 😉
I’ll take a look… a little at a time 😉
Somebody spams this blog more than me? Damn … I’m slipping!!!
My old blog went down in a spam event horizon due to these parasites. So do what you must.
Since I’m still relatively a newb around here this is a test of the new system to see if it makes it through as previous ones have.
Also if not to intrusive a question for you. You’ve mentioned how it would not be possible for you to run this blog on top of a regular job due to the ammount of time involved with research ,writing ,and etc. So does running this give you any chance for making money due to page views ,pass through links or other sources. Not considering the presents from your wish list or other sources because it seems they are more of a bonus rather than regular income.
I’m asking out of curiousity as well as trusting you as an honest source. I’ve heard that it is possible to make some money doing a blog, have an idea that would help people with a subject that I’am knowledgable on, and have some time that could be dedicated. So without being to specific about ammount, and realizing that it doesn’t pay as well as your escorting days. Would you say that it is possible to get more money than from flipping burgers at McD’s for example.
If you would rather not respond to this no worries, okay. But perhaps some of the other regulars that have mentioned particapating in similar enterprises wouldn’t mind helping out with some information.
Actually, there isn’t a new system; I’m only handling the spam filter differently in two ways: 1) Dumping it only once a day, and 2) Not screening it before I dump it.
I’m sure there is some way to make money directly from the blog, but I haven’t investigated it at all because I have no intention of changing my writing so as to embed other people’s links, nor defacing my site with ugly banner or flashing/jumping ad bullshit. I may soon add a donation function but that will be strictly voluntary, and I also plan to bring out some “Honest Courtesan” merchandise soon (T-shirts, etc). But I sincerely doubt that will bring in all that much income; what I’m hoping for is a book deal. That probably won’t make a lot either, but anything is more than I’m making from this gig now. I prefer to think of myself as one of the courtesans of old supported by a generous patron, rather than as someone doing a job.
Just don’t do what Ace of Spades did with his ASCMS (Automated Spam Countermeasure System …
http://minx.cc/?post=336904
Reminds me of that scene in _Robocop_:
It’s a demo of a new robot policeman. A man in the boardroom has been given a gun and told to point it at the robot policeman.
(The robot policeman looks like Krulac, but metallic.)
Robot policeman: You have twenty seconds to put down your weapon.
Boardroom Man puts the gun on the conference table.
Robot policeman: You have fifteen seconds.
hi Maggie i do think a book biograffy would sell very well indead you do have serious skill and i would
be happy to donate to your blog i read it all the time matbe even invest in your book if that ever becomes an option Best reg Cody
sorry for bad spelling
I wish you could hire somebody to spend a few hours a day going through the spam folder. Maybe two somebodies; nobody should have to do that more than a few hours at a time. I don’t know how much that would cost, and since you’re not making any money from this, any amount is a bit much.
Of course, as the Akismet gets better, you won’t need to count on mere humans. 😉
More than once I have come to read your latest post and then spent more time reading previous linked posts, so I would gladly donate to keep you going!
The merchandise idea sounds great too, can’t wait to see what you come up with.
I cooldn’t have said it better myself, dude.