Lately the hobolog has been receiving a hundred or more SPAM comments per day, mostly from online gaming places. I can’t keep up with deleting them all. For now I have resorted to comment moderation, which means that you can still make comments but they won’t show up until I approve them. I hope this doesn’t discourage you from leaving your comments. The hobolog wouldn’t be the same without them.

Here’s a little background on this form of SPAM if you’re curious. The SPAM comments come from robots: computer programs that spew links to their web sites anywhere they can on the internet. Often they just look like nonsense if you read them, and you might wonder why they’d bother with such useless advertising. The answer is that they’re not advertising to you, the highly intelligent readers of the hobolog, but to other robots. The readers they are interested in are seach engine robots. The search engines use robots also to read all the pages on the web for searching. When links to a particular site appear more often, that site goes up in rank, which means it will appear higher in the list of results when someone searches for ‘poker’, for instance.

The SPAM robots are an irritating, stupid enemy. They never give up, and they never realize that their evil deeds do no good on my site because I delete their trash links immediately. So, instead of accomplishing their purpose here, they merely make things more difficult for the people who come here. Our battle with the robots has begun, ala The Matrix. It’s likely that neither side will win.