Got Our First Spam Comment

This must be a real web site now–we just received our first spam comment!

Author: Vapor Quest (IP address: 185.185.132.99, 185.185.132.99)
Email: mgould1536@icloud.com
URL: http://dermatologist.com.ua/user/cbdinfuse4893/
Comment:
Has anybody ever shopped at Vapor Stix Vapor Store located in 1707 Bayshore Road?

Luckily, WordPress has a very cool moderation feature that requires approval for an anonymous user’s first comment. So, this spam bot’s work never made it to the page. (Anyone know where 1707 Bayshore Road is located?)

Putting yourself “out there” (here?) sure invites a lot of feedback, both good and bad. I look forward to engaging in conversations with the public. Normally, I would avoid them as they seem unproductive, but I hope to encourage some real, thoughtful conversations on topics I might some experience to share and could also learn a thing or two.

While you’re here, enjoy this comedian’s response to an email spammer, presented in a Ted Talk. I once heard someone say a good way to fight back against spammers is to waste their time. Maybe I should write a battle bot that turns around and fights back against spammers using their same technique. We used this technique once when I worked at Intel. Someone had written bad code that “forked” a process continuously such that it consumed all the system resources. We couldn’t manually kill the process fast enough, so we wrote another program to find and kill all those processes by forking itself over and over again. It worked! Eventually, it killed the other process before the server crashed because of the OOM (out of memory) killer.