God I hate Spam.
I've been dealing with spam for most of my professional life, and it's an online presence which almost makes me want to abandon my career of... ya know... putting stuff online.
First we got email spam. Thousands of people across the country had to be hired to defend users against this new menace. Software is created and sold to guard against spam with the spammers always trying to stay 1 step ahead of all the filters. It's a never ending game of spammers trying to get through the fence and us building more and bigger fences, sometimes actually stopping the people who we WANT getting through.
Then we have forum spam, which I'm currently dealing with on Horror Junk. These porn sites set up software robots to come to my site, use my bandwidth, enter their crap into my database, then post pornographic pictures to the forum. It's not a huge deal and just 1 "delete" click away, except that now I have to open up all this source code to disallow anyone with a "mail.ru" address from posting. Then I'll have to add to those filters whenever my meager brain starts picking out a pattern to the spammers.
And of course, comment spam on this here blog. I've put in dozens of filters and some still get through, as the link above shows. But the most ridiculous part of this process is that I've filtered out every web address anyone tries to post, absolutely eliminating any benefit whatsoever from this spam. They're getting nothing, but they're being a pain in my butt, frustrating me and potentially costing me money by using my bandwidth. What's the point?
To me, it's like randomly keying a car in a parking lot. If you know and hate the person, sure, I can see how one would get a sense of satisfaction from the act. But at random? All you're doing is costing the poor victim time and money to repair it and you get home no better than when you left.
Anyway, that's my rant on spammers today. This weekend I'll spend some time on my various site implementing more front-end javascript and back-end PHP filters to stop these jack asses from robotically posting nonsense to my site. I hope they all rot in shit forever.