Writing interesting blogs is something I try to do, mostly to thunderous silence. However from time to time I do get valuable on-the-record comments directly on the blog sites, and also more often hear from emails directly. For the former, I almost always approve them as written, positive or negative, albeit with some very minor editing if misspellings or little grammar errors are included. For the latter, I will hide the sender's identity, since they were sent to me privately and also do some editing to to remove any personal identifying comments as well as extraneous or profane remarks and errors in spelling or grammar. All in all, these are fairly routine and expected. In addition I hear from many others along the lines of "I read all or most of your newsletters and blogs and enjoy them." Oh well, I have no option but take those as positives. Thank you!
However it is happening more and more as my inventory of blogs accumulates that robot web-crawlers or possibly human weirdos also search for blogs and leave comments. These used to be in the onesie-twosie range but lately have ramped up to be a real nuisance. In fact, over the last week alone, the number of "ghost" or "bot"comments have totaled seventy-three, over ten a day! So I go in and look at these, identify them as "spam,"' and delete them. As a matter of interest (perhaps to me alone) here is a summary, as best I can do, to the apparent subject or reason or purpose of these. To be honest, I'm not sure of quite a few, and have lumped them in the "other/unknown" category.
Here we go, with 73 in all:
- 21 Offering "help" as far as I can tell, to make the story/site/reach/writing better.
- 12 Recommending a U-Tube site for me to watch.
- 12 Offering "hot sex" on various sites.
- 11 Offering 10-1 increases in income, with the usual being to make a $1K "investment" with return of between $10K and (mostly) $15K a week (or was it a month?), with only 30 minutes of work. Sounds great, doesn't it?"
- 2 Movie reviews and comments, with a stupendous 7 page summary of the greatness of "AquaMan" and one also on a new Jurassic Park sequel.
- 1 Offer of a loan.
- 17 A collection of many others, in strange combinations and probably versions of the list above. Some of these are so poorly written that it's obvious a "translator" from another language to English was used.
Eight of these were in foreign languages, half in French and half in German. I could understand them and put them into the categories above. Unsurprisingly, one can find "hot women" in both languages plus English! (smiley face)
Not sure what to do this this "Bot spam" summary, but to list it. I suppose it's another form of the curse of the struggling and mostly unknown writer.
Enjoy life, it's the only one we will get.
Jim George
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* Please check out my books and blogs on my author website
and recommend them to your friends. Also, recall that I’ll travel to any book club (or radio club) within two hours of Austin to discuss either of the books and answer any questions. Any and all comments are welcome either by email to my return address, n3bb@mindspring.com, or to the website in the comments section after any blog.
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