July 21, 2009 - 8:10am
July 22, 2009 - 9:53pm
Spam - glass half empty, or half full?
Yes, spam is a pain, but let's look at it from a brick-and-mortar perspective. If someone new visited your church dressed 'inappropriately', how would you treat them? Ask them to leave? Place bouncers at all the entrances to make sure everyone met the dress code? Start using language and jargon that only insiders understood? Would you approach them and introduce yourself and introduce them to others? How would you communicate your values to them in a way they would still continue to visit and hear the Word, but also to be less of a distraction?
Let's take it in another direction. Do you have a lot of noisy kids in your worship service, or are they with all the other children somewhere else?
Here's one I'm not quite sure what to do with - I have been receiving several new user registrations from the Russian equivalent of Google (yandex.ru). The users haven't been posting anything, just including urls in their profiles and signatures to sites I am sure are just looking for link juice.
I am able (and have elected to) not display user profiles to anonymous visitors, so their efforts won't do much for them. I am also able to block registrations for users with email addresses from specific domains (which I just did for this domain). I have conducted a few experiments and removed the urls from their profiles and signatures, only to find the users coming back and adding the urls again. Because of this, I'm pretty certain I'm not getting hit by bots.
My question is this - do I just sit back and see what happens, or do I become more proactive? As I mentioned, I feel the primary reason they are registering is to promote their urls. Until they start to post comments or add to the forums, they won't have any benefit. I have considered beginning a counter-measure and begin sending them emails of an evangelistic nature. I have also entertained using their email addresses to subscribe them to a prayer-of-the-day or verse-of-the-day mailing list.
What thoughts do you have?
Steve K
Christian Web Resources