It may not be obvious because I haven’t been posting new content as frequently as I’d hoped I could, but I check my site every day. To keep the site secure it’s important to log into the administrative interface and install any updates to the core WordPress software and plugins. It only takes a few minutes but can save hours of work cleaning up after someone hacks into the site using some unpatched vulnerability. It’s mostly like keeping your computer safe by regularly updating virus and malware definitions, installing security updates, and scanning for malware. Most modern computer systems do this automatically, but it’s a manual process for WordPress. It’s an easy, basic maintenance task.
Another regular task is moderating comments, but I haven’t had to do much of that. This blog is really new, and there haven’t been many comments to moderate. The other day I was surprised and a little excited to find a bunch of comments waiting to be moderated. Had my little blog been discovered? Had I acquired an audience of enthusiastic readers? I eagerly clicked on the “Comments” button in the administrative interface to find out. My excitement rapidly turned into annoyance as I read through a seemingly endless list of nonsensical crap. Some of the comments were just links, some were advertisements, and others were religious right-wing propaganda. It was all spam. Not the good kind of spam that comes in a can that you fry up into delicious slabs of hammy goodness on Sunday mornings. No, it was the bad kind that fills up your email or, in this case, your comment moderation queue.
It took quite some time to look through all the comments, and I have to confess that I gave up after a while and just started deleting them without really checking to see if they were really spam. If you left a “real” comment and I inadvertently deleted it, please accept my apology and resubmit it. The silver lining to this particular cloud was that I gained an interesting insight. The spam I received that wasn’t just a link to a random, probably malware riddled, web site seemed to fall into one of three categories. There were financial scams, ads for erectile dysfunction drugs, and racist right-wing religious dreck. Logically speaking, if spam wasn’t effective then spammers would stop spreading it all over the internet. There must be an audience for this stuff! Who could it be that falls for this garbage? What demographic could possibly be dumb enough to be fooled by obviously bogus financial scams and blindly follow links to virus-infested web sites? Apparently, they’re the same people that need erectile dysfunction drugs, hate people of color, and are zealously christian. I won’t make the sweeping generalization that all white, male christians are intellectually challenged. I know plenty of white, male christians that aren’t racists and are smart enough to not fall for financial scams. It stands to reason, however, that there are enough that aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed to make spam profitable.
