Paul's Comments

I had this site set up at a duplicate location, in the hope of perhaps running it from a site that would not run banner ads. I have an account with a company called "nearlyfreespeech.net" and basically they run a no-monthly fee service, just pay for disk space and transfers, and they are fairly inexpensive, on the order of perhaps $1 per gigabyte transferred per month, computed to the nearest penny. Disk space was something like 1c per megabyte per month, or 1c for 31 megabytes for one day, or any combination of the two.

Well, just to see what would happen, I left the system with comments enabled. And like leaving an apartment with exposed food and no protections, the roaches moved in and started filthing up the place. It's a nothing site, non-indexed and located on a subdomain (as opposed to being its own domain, as this site is) and I still get people spamming it with garbage, most of which I didn't bother to look at.

So I decided to stop accumulating storage and bandwidth charges for the site, even though they're probably minimal, and deleted it. All you get now, if you access that site, is a message that because spammers ruined it, it's been closed and a link you can click on to come here (with an advisory that this site is locked down and they can't post anything here.)

I really wish it were possible to track down and expropriate everything from these spammers and the people who hire them, but for the moment there ain't much we can do about it except to work around them. Until it becomes impossible to make money by spamming or spam hosting or link spamming, it will continue. If it was economically unfeasable it would cease.

I hate having this sort of attitude. I believe in free speech, I believe in it very strongly, even where I disagree with the opinion. It's one thing for someone to make a comment on my website in which he looks at an article and says, "Paul, you're a complete idiot, and here's why." I would have no problem leaving up such a comment even though (clearly) I would disagree with it.

It's quite another when someone posts a totally unrelated comment and wants to try to post an ad for some company selling erectile dysfunction drugs, and possibly counterfeit ones, no less. Or they post garbage having absolutely no relation to my comment, and doesn't even work. Those I can't understand; a posting for some porn site or a drug distributor makes some sense, but a posting that goes to a non-working site makes very little. (I am presuming if they're posting links to a site they're not going to get paid if they aren't valid, so it would make sense they'd check them. Or maybe they don't care. Or maybe the postings are being done by bots, (and in the interim the original web site has been shut down) I don't know.

But the right to free speech does not mean I have to pay for a worthless comment for someone else's benefit. Let them spam their own sites and/or link-spam Google or something; it's got plenty of money and can afford it (as well as being able to afford to take measures to make link-spam non-economic.) I'm just an ordinary guy who scrapes along as best he can, it's not fair for them to dump costs on me that serve absolutely no benefit to me. (I accept that if someone criticizes my comments I do benefit because I learn something about why I might be wrong, even if I disagree. I think it would also show that I'm willing to accept alternative opinions to my own.)

But I want to find out something which I had a problem here as well before I locked the place down and disabled all posting by others. Is the spamming I get by bots, or is it by individuals actually posting these links one at a time? I think I'm going to try putting in some changes to the capcha system for posting, basically it will, if I do it right, stop automated spammers and only allow people who post messages personally. Since the picture system didn't work right I'll use a text capcha. Now, if I'm wrong and most of the spam I get really is individuals, then I'll know. So - for the infitesimal number of actual people who do read what I write - this system will become open to make comments shortly, albeit you'll have to enter a code to prove you're a person.