Spammers (Premium)

I start the morning the same way every day: Wake up, drink coffee, and read the news. And then I start wrestling with spammers on Thurrott.com.

Spam generally takes two forms on the site. There are spam comments on the articles and posts that Mehedi, Brad, and I write, and on the forum posts that readers create. And then there are spam forum posts, which are easily spotted in the “Currently on Forums” module on the front page.

I don’t understand either form of spam, much like I don’t understand why spammers have historically sent crap to people’s homes in the forms of leaflets and other mass-mailings. The success rate must be very low. And more generally, I’ve always felt that people who aren’t helping should just get the hell out of the way. If you’re in the way, you’re a problem.

Intellectually, however, I really wrestle with the pathology of people who go to the effort to create an account for the site—we’ve made it more difficult over the years specifically to combat this kind of thing—and then start posting what is so clearly spam. Some of these idiots even add a profile photo. I mean, none of this stuff is even slightly sophisticated.

Personally, I find this trampling over something I’ve had a hand in creating to be particularly insulting. We conceived Thurrott.com as a destination for tech enthusiasts, not for insect spammers. We want there to be good conversations, debates, and exchanges of ideas. I’ve always believed, and I’m often proved right, that I—and the other Thurrott.com contributors—have as much to learn from readers as the reverse. The back and forth is what matters most. Learning is the best.

And then these people, these insects, just keep burrowing in every day, trying to ruin it. For some reason.

It reminds me of a story you may have heard me tell before.

We first moved to our previous home in Dedham, Massachusetts in early 2002. That house was on a curved corner, and we had a lot of property bordering the two intersecting streets, and a lot of lawn to mow. When I first started mowing that lawn—I referred to the front lawn as “the front 9” and the back lawn as “the back 9”—I noticed some number of dog droppings each week. I didn’t own a dog. Didn’t want to own a dog. Most certainly didn’t want to clean up after a dog. This was troubling.

A few months into this, I was making coffee one weekend morning and happening to catch some movement out on the front lawn. Sure enough, there was a large dog, wiggling its butt over my perfectly mowed lawn and leaving me another present. I ran outside to try and stop this, but I was too late. However, I did see the dog go trotting down the street to a home on the next corner.

So, I grabbed one of the kids’ paper lunch bags, shoveled the dog mess inside, and neatly folded the top as if it were ready for lunch. Then I took it down to that house on the next corner and rang the doorbell. It was about 8 am on a Saturday or Sunday. And a slightly disheveled woman in a bathrobe answered the door.

“This is for you,” I said, handing her the bag through the door she opened as I did so. She took it, mostly confused.

“And if I ever catch your dog shitting on my lawn again, I’m going to f$%king kill it,” I said. And left.

I still remember her, standing there. Confused. Holding the bag of shit.

Two things. I never saw that dog again, and it never left me another present on my lawn. And we surrounded our yard in a huge and expensive PVC fence a year later, preventing any other errant mistakes from that or other dogs in the neighborhood.

My issues with that dog—really, that dog’s owners—are very similar to my issues with spammers.

I don’t get it. In the case of the dog, I don’t understand flouting a town’s leash laws and letting a large animal run around a neighborhood in which I, at the time, and many others, had small children and others who might be afraid of a large animal. Worse, these people were letting the dog out specifically to go to the bathroom, but they had a fence of their own around their back yard, and so were clearly letting it out front. Where they had to know—had to know—that it was relieving itself elsewhere. Making their problem someone else’s problem. That is unacceptable.

As a life-long pet owner—we had dogs and cats growing up, cats during my entire married life, and now have a dog again as well—I have never and will never allow any animal for which I’m responsible to do something like that to others. It’s not just the law, it’s the right thing to do. I don’t understand behaving otherwise.

Put simply, some creature was coming to my house and shitting on my lawn.

Today, some people are coming to my house, every single day, and shitting on my site, our readers, and the conversations we’re all trying to have. And I do not appreciate it.

We have a neat tool now that lets me delete a spammer’s user account and, in doing so, retroactively delete any content—spam comments, spam forum posts, whatever—that they created. This makes it easy to remove any offending content in a single whack. Between that tool and the other things we have in place to combat spammers, I have the virtual equivalent of a fence, something that generally works well in preventing bad behavior.

What I don’t have, of course, is a way to hand a bag of shit to these jerks. And that is something I silently fantasize about every single morning.

Every. Single. Morning.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. If you’re reading this, know that you are a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, and that I appreciate the interactions we have here every day. Know, too, that I will continue fighting the good fight. And that I appreciate any actions you take, via our flagging system and the SPAMMERS! forum post, to provide neighborhood watch-type assistance. We’ll never really stop it. But keeping it to a minimum is certainly our collective goal.