Сегодня вся планета Земля переживает очень сложный период в жизни. Многие лишились …..  don’t worry, the rest of this entry is in English and we are not going to sell you holiday timeshares anywhere.  This was a small excerpt of one of the daily attempts by various people to infiltrate the Blog with links for everything from travel to pharmaceuticals to, well, use your imagination.

But it won’t work, and you’ll never see them, because the site is set up so that not only must we approve any comment before it’s visible, the public won’t even see that a comment is waiting to be reviewed.  If you have your own Blog, or if you read other Blogs that might not be so careful, you’ll know exactly what we mean.

And where do these come from?  The very great majority originate in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia.  They are almost never in English, usually quite long, and never something we will publish.  WordPress gives us the immediate option to approve, delete, or mark as spam.  We spam them, but that’s not all.   Internet police are alive and well, and several sites let (and encourage) us report the I.P. address — a technical thing — under a slew of categories ranging from “attempted hacking” to “Blog spam”,  which is the obvious one for us.  We do this, and the guardian site shows us how many others have reported the same thing, and then the overall reputation of that address.  It sounds more complicated than it is, but when they get enough reliable reports, they go right to the blacklist.

So, bottom line, we (and definitely not you) are not overly bothered by the spam attempts.  They take no time to manage.  But they add no value to anyone’s website and will not appear on ours.

One more thing, about the card we are using for this entry.  We thought we had a postcard of the real Spam, and maybe we do, but can’t find it easily.  So, instead, we will just give you a nice mash-up of different colours to liven up your day.

Until next time …