Spam and Trash

Respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by about if you are getting a lot of spam recently, or why you think spammers do what they do, or why do they persist when they are blocked and nobody will ever see what they wrote, because you had it sent into your trash folder, or you could write about whatever else that you think might fit.  I am under an avalanche of spam now and I noticed that a lot of the spam that I am getting is coming from butt kissers who say things like, “I always read your very good blog and become the best blog now and in the future”, which is not a very well structured sentence and it puzzles me why they want to do this.  There are subtle changes where they could say my, “blog was very innovative and very inspiring” and they are also very cordial thanking me for adding new experiences for them and their friends, so no harm, no foul, but what is their point in doing this?  To me there is no clear motivation for these spammers to continue doing this other than trying to annoy me.  One thing that I have noticed about the spammers is that they are a lot like cockroaches, only coming out at night and that is probably because they live on the other side of the planet.  I did find this video that is probably just what I am looking for, but I wasn’t able to follow the instructions.

My WordPress site is secured, so I am not worried about malware or any malicious code getting through to send me a Phishing attack, a Trojan or some type of ransomware.  These automated bot spammers don’t gain anything by sending their unwanted comments to my posts, but they don’t lose anything either, because nothing prevents them from writing a response to any of my posts.  The spammers seem to be an organized bunch who are openly admitting that their writing skills are inferior to mine and they are probably hoping for some unknown type of deeper attack where they will be able to do some damage if I were to start engaging with them.  AI Web Scrapper is a tool that utilizes artificial intelligence algorithms to automate and refine the process of extracting data from the internet into spreadsheets and apps.  Some people are using this to scoop up every bit of information that is on your website, so they can train their AI models to provide chatbot answers, generate text or create photo realistic images.  It doesn’t seem fair for you to do all the work and then have your data scrapped.

I try to block the spammers by going under Settings – Discussion – Disallowed Comment Keys, and by adding their names so that they no longer go in my spam folder, instead going directly to my TRASH folder.  The problem is that my trash folder only empties out every 30 days and then they are permanently deleted.  I have the paid Explorer plan and I wrote to the Happiness Engineers about this issue, and they said that they would get back to me.  This is what I wrote, “I emptied out all of my trash on May 18, 2024, which took me a lot of time to do because I had over 1,000 messages in my Trash folder, however now it is much worse as there are currently over 24,000 messages in my trash folder.  I have been getting spammed every day since and I added a lot of these spammer’s names to my Disallowed Comment Keys section, which puts all of their unwanted comments in my Trash folder.  My trash has almost 16,000 messages in it now and it will just keep increasing in size till June 17, 2024, when the 30-day period is reached for my trash to be emptied.”  I have no idea how these Happiness engineers are able to keep their jobs, as they wrote back to me and said that I should take advantage of the Akismet anti-spam feature that comes with Jetpack.  I checked my Dashboard under Jetpack and went to Akismet anti-spam and found out that in the Past six months 59,748 Spam messages were blocked.  All time statistics say that 208,260 Spam messages were blocked with a supposed accuracy of 99.9% as 28 spam messages were missed, and there were 269 false positives, which is something that is initially thought to be spam, but it turned out to be ham.  If you look at the chart below, you can see how my spam has skyrocketed in May and June and June has only just started, so who knows how high this will go.

I blogged unofficially on the April A to Z challenge this year and my theme was Blogging and for some unknown reason these spammers have singled out my post P is for Prompts for their attack, as I got over 15,000 spam messages on that one post.  Every day I get at least 70 new spam messages on this post and now I am getting almost 1,000 new messages appearing in my trash every day from this post and I don’t see what the attraction is.  They are drawn to this post like flies to manure and like bees to honey they flock to my post every day.  I am tired of being scraped and harvested and I wonder if there is there some magnetic force that is attracting all of these spammers to this post, or if they have all ganged up against me because they have decided that I am an easy target.  Akismet is sending all of their comments to my trash folder once I block them, but new ones pop up out of the woodwork every day.  I don’t see why I should have to delete my post to make this issue go away, but I may end up doing that because it seems like word has gotten around that this is the post that everyone should be spamming.  I joined WordPress hoping to make the world a better pace and if this new post can raise awareness about why spammers are doing what they are doing or prevent any more spam from bothering anyone else, I think the world will be better off for it.

There is a bulk delete plugin that could get rid of all of my trash, but my plan does not support any plugins.  I saw a video that gives directions how to change the number of days that your trash is emptied out for anyone who has the confidence to work with PHP code, which is based on the C programming language.  It was not all that easy to follow and it hinged on you being able to modify a file named wp-config.php, which I was unable to find on my computer, so watching this video did me no good at all and I guess that I have to wait for the Happiness Engineers to get back to me, or just let my trash build up till it destroys the whole internet.