Lurking Spam Bots Can Be Entertaining
One aspect of running a blog I had not anticipated was dealing with spam. Not just any spam, but computer generated SpamBot spam! I’ve known for years about ‘bots trolling the Internet to harvest email addresses. A lot of the spam you receive in your email can be a result of your leaving comments in various Internet forums or any other online venue where an email is listed on a Web page. The owners of those ‘bots will harvest any email their minions collect and sell the list to the real spammers. Now another type of spam bot is the one that trolls blogs and attempts to leave garbage in the blogs’ comments area. I use a plug-in called Askimet that does a very good job of isolating those comments before they get posted on the blog.