Wednesday, March 23, 2005

 

Followup on the adblogs

I was not quite correct in my assessment of 9 out of 10. It seems I was overestimating based on a small sample... I decided to do a more exhaustive test of a much larger sample, 1000 would be large enough I thought. I've been looking on and off for the past week and it is more like 6 of 10. I would log on and go to the dashboard for this blog and then examine all 10 of the most recent update list at the bottom the page. All I did was keep track of how many were adblogs. I added several blogs I ran across to my list of blogs to read again. Every list of 10 had at least 1 blog which consisted completely of links revolving around some form of advertising for something. There were several times when all 10 were adblogs. After 100 page views (that is 1000 blogs I looked at in total 10 at a time) viewed more or less at random times of the day over the past 10 days, 610 were adblogs. That is 61% people!! This statistic makes me ill, that the spammers who deluge our email boxes are now clogging up the disk space of blogger with this drivel.

[a side note on spammers: over a year ago, I want on walkabout. I wasn't in a position to use my own mail server from terminals on the road, so I changed my address and told everyone I usually corespond with. I chose an addresss at yahoo dot com because I could get mail there through any public access point. At shorttime dot com, my domain, I creatd a single email autoresponder named "catch-all at shorttime dot com" and deleted al other email accounts. Catch-all responded to every email received at the domain with a short note saying no mail was being accepted at my domain of shorttime dot com and to send any important email to a new address of rvgetsla at yahoo dot com. (You can figure this new address out quite easily, but a bot can't. This was just in case I missed telling someone, which I did, of course. Murphy said so.) Every incoming email was deleted sight unseen. To this day, well over a year later, catch-all (is not now and never was a real person) is receiving spam, sometimes as many as 30 in a day. Why these people who gleaned this address from somewhere would think anyone with a name like catch-all would need natural male enhancemnt, breast enlargement pills, need to rebuild credit, wipe out bankruptcy, need to consolidate debt or refinance a home loan is anyone's guess. And then there are the Nigerian, Chinese, Liberian, whatever people who found my name on the internet while doing research and they just KNOW they can trust me to help them get some unclaimed money invest in this country or donate to charities in this country but oh-by-the-way I have to send them some money first, the instant winner lotteries who drew catch-all out of their lists which mysteriously lost the name associated with the address and oh-by-the-way I have to send them a fee before they will release the prize, and credit card account scams who seem to think catch-all has an account with any of several banks, paypal, ebay, whoever. I only see the stats on how many were deleted from my mail server sight unseen, so I don't know who exactly is sending mail to my catch-all autoresponder, but if it is a person, then the stupidity of this person is showing. Twits! Idiots!.]

Posted by: Rowlfe - at: 3/23/2005 06:00:00 PM

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