I Am Not That Stupid

Posted by Stropp on August 8, 2008

I really hate being treated like I’m an idiot. I really do.

I received a comment on one of my Age of Conan posts yesterday where the commenter effectively stated that he liked AoC and it was great to be able to knock other players off bridges with mounts. Well… okay… It’s not really on topic since I posted about Age of Conan succeeded in the long term. But, when I get a comment on one of my posts that’s only a little off topic, I really don’t mind.

I have this blog set to do follow. I use a plugin that is set to revert all comment links from no follow to do follow after two days. This allows me time to check if a comment is spam before passing link juice on to the spammer. Since I want to encourage commenting from other folks, I think it’s only right to pass on that do follow love.

But here’s the rub. When I get deliberate no value comment spamming, I’ll mark the post as spam in Akismet. This has two effects. First, it removes the comment from my blog and sends it to the trash. No big deal for the commenter really since all they’ve wasted is their time commenting — which if the comment I received yesterday is any indication, it took all of three and a half seconds.

Secondly, and this hurts, the commenters comment, IP address, email address, blog URL, and other relevant data gets added to the Akismet spam database. That means that, if enough of these messages get marked as spam, the offending blogger gets their blog marked as spam. In the future any comments from the offending commenter are blacklisted by Akismet and any blog using that system filters them out.

So back to the story. Yesterdays commenter left a comment that was a little off topic. No big deal. I’m not an ogre when it comes to blog comment relevance — I’ve never played one either– as long as the comment is close. But I don’t like being treated like a fool.

So when the commenter in question comes back three whole minutes later with a new comment agreeing with his previous comment — also slightly off topic by the way — with a different name but using the same identifying information, I can’t help feeling like I’m being treated like an idiot. Surely I’m not smart enough to recognize this attempt at spamming, am I?

Ironically, the blog he was promoting wasn’t all that bad either. If he had left a value comment, he wouldn’t have shot himself in the foot.

Age of Conan commenter, meet Akismet. I’m sure you will have a long and fruitless relationship together.

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