Hans Across The Interwebs

wall of spam by chotda

Last week the New York times posted a story about the poor bloggers who just can’t do anything but blog 24/7. Apparently they never get to sleep in fear of missing a scoop (and traffic/income), they don’t exercise, eat terribly and as a consequence they have heart attacks and die all over the place. A sad state of affairs, so suffice it to say I was glad to hear it is all worth it.

Some things have happened to me recently that caused me to think about another group on the internet that’s even worse off than the bloggers. If such a thing can be contemplated.

Web Spam 101

It all started with my website Wordsy. People can log in there and post stories about books, authors, et cetera. Every so often in the beginning, I’d get some bogus story about Viagra or Free College Papers. The system used for setting up my site (Drupal) makes it easy enough to ‘unpublish’ such a story, but it started happening so often I needed more help. So just to be clear, I’m not talking about regular old ‘one-click, one million emails’-type spam. This is spam posted on websites. As comments or as stories.

So I enlisted the help of Akismet. This is a service, from the creators of WordPress, that filters all stories and all comments for possible spam. When I first set it up, it worked really well and I didn’t see any spam for a while. But now it’s back.

Some of the spam was noticeably being posted by bots. These are actually just computers with smart programs that scour the web for websites to post their links. As a counter measture I installed a so called ‘Captcha‘. A test to find out if someone is actually human before allowing them to post. (On an interesting side note, we’re also helping digitizing the world’s libraries at the same time)

Of course I take my usual recourse: I unpublish the spam and I block the IP. That means that anyone from the internet connection of the spammer can no longer access my site. At first I simply gave them a white empty page. I’ve tried wasting their time by making the site horribly slow. For the past few weeks I’ve been Rick Rolling them: after typing my url, they go directly to a youtube clip of Rick Astley singing ‘never gonna give you up’. It’s all the hype you know.

The Human Tragedy Of Spam

Now here comes the sad part. The spam keeps coming. And because of the Captcha, I know there are actual human beings who are creating accounts, logging into sites and posting spam. This is someone’s job! They are not the Spam Overlords, they are Spam Soldiers.

And this is sad because:

• First of all, a lot of these Spam Soldiers I’m assuming live in developing nations. It’s not the capitalist successes there, that are scouring websites to post little links. It’s poor people who are probably happy to even make a dollar an hour doing this job. They’re the lowest rung on the Internet food chain. They probably don’t like what they’re doing, either. It’s their boss’ bidding.
• But also, they’re not just giving up their dignity by doing this lowly work. They’re giving up much more. As I mark their posts as spam, their IP-addresses get propagated through Akismet and other services. Their Internet addressess become well known. Sites around the world start blocking access. The spam soldiers then see nothing but whiteness. White, unreachable websites, all over the place. No information, no opinions, no nothing.

I hate the spammer overlords and they need to evaporate. But as for the poor spammer minions, I feel bad for them. Though I’m still going to block them.

Web spam - Human Rights Tragedy or Firing Squad Offense? What do you think?