Monday, May 26, 2008

Welcome To Musings of a Metafilter Spammer!

Hi, and welcome to my new blog dedicated to tracking the thoughtless musings of those who spam Metafilter from before they spam it.

Anybody who visits Metafilter regularly knows the drill. Someone signs up for the singular purpose of spamming the Metafilter frontpage, makes their mandatory three or four comments before being able to do so and is then beaten with the banhammer by our ever diligent moderators. Naturally the comments made by these spammers aren't the most significant contributions ever to be posted to Metafilter... until now! 'Musings of a Metafilter Spammer' compiles the thoughts of each spammer in one single place, so you can read such thoughtful musings as "Nice!", "Wonder where I can get one?" and "Wow" before their posting rights (and their account) were forever deleted. And in doing so you'll get to laugh at the sheer simplicity of some of these asinine comments, and maybe stumble across some of the otherwise decent threads they used to make them in.

Things I Will Be Doing.

  • This blog started in May 2008. As such there are a tonne of spammers I haven't yet included. My plan is to do so, but given I also hold down a busy job and have a fiancee and two kids that need my attention (my Wii and PS3), so my time is tight. As such, I'll be doing these slowly and intermittently.
  • By the same token, new spammers will be added to this blog when they spam, when I see them and when I have the time to write up a post.
  • Eventually I wouldn't mind having co-authors on this site. Eventually. I am but one man and as I said earlier, I have little time, so fellow contributors to the site would be great. E-mail me if you're interested and when my ADD starts to kick in (and I remember my e-mail password), I'll let you know!
  • I will be counting comments not just from Metafilter, but from other parts of the site (AskMe, Music, etc).
  • I will be asking readers to e-mail me heads-up on future spammers and spammers of old who deserve a mention here but may not have gotten one yet. If you do, I'll link to your Metafilter user page in the post with a thanks.
  • I'll be tracking their comments with tags. This will give us an idea of the average amount of comments a spammer makes before spamming.
  • I'll also be tracking what kind of content they are spamming us with through tags. So let's say their spammy post is about animals, they'll be tagged with 'animals'. If it's about their crappy band, it'll be tagged with 'myband'. Get the picture?

Things I Won't Be Doing.

  • Sometimes, somehow, someone spams Metafilter after 10 comments or more. I won't be including these on this blog. 10 comments (cumulative from ALL parts of the site) will be the upper limit. After that, spammer or not, I'll just be considering them as some poor fool who didn't know that Projects existed.
  • I won't be including spammers whose account wasn't deleted by the mods after their FPP was deleted. In such cases I'll be assuming that our esteemed moderators felt that there was a reason for leniency on their part, which in itself implies that perhaps the spamming wasn't entirely malicious.
  • If a spammer makes a comment in their own spammy thread, I won't be counting it as part of their comment total. So for example, let's say the spammer makes three comments, spams Metafilter and in that thread makes two or three more comments, the post will still be tagged as 3comments.
  • I won't be linking to the spammy FPP directly from this site, for two reasons. One; I don't think that they need another link to the site they tried to illegally promote on Metafilter to exist somewhere on the web. Secondly, puke & cry runs an excellent blog called Deleted Thread which catalogs all deleted threads already, including those made by spammers. What I will be doing though is linking to the spammers disabled user page and the Deleted Thread entry for the post, so it's not like these threads will be impossible to find if you really wanted to find them.
  • Too many site announcements.
Now go and read, and enjoy!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Someone signs up for how do you stop spam the singular purpose of spamming the Metafilter frontpage,