Recently I have noticed a disturbing trend that is making the battle against spam harder. Normally the way you tell a legitimate commenter from a spammer is to check that the comment is on-topic and free of bad links.

Increasingly, I am finding more and more spam commenters whose writing is certainly on-topic. It doesn’t look like it has been generated by a bot. And even sometimes it is a valuable addition to the discussion.

But one thing is wrong. The comment author URL leads to some kind of business / gambling / spam site.

For as long as I think such contributions are beneficial to the discussion, I will allow them. But I will remove the comment author URL if I think it is unsuitable.

For guidance: Comment author URLs may be any personal websites — blogs, Flickr, Twitter, whatever. They may not be business websites or any spammy content.

If the problem continues, I will start throwing the comments themselves into the spam bin as well.

Elsewhere…

In other news, there is an exciting new feature! Well, not that exciting. But if you look in the sidebar you will see that I have ten ‘featured posts’ there. These are older posts that might have slipped your attention.

As time goes on I get more and more stressed about the fact that my lovingly crafted writing drops off the front page so quickly — particularly under this new year regime of daily posting. So there you have it. If you ever fancy reading something a little bit older, start from the ‘featured posts’ section. (And the ‘best of’ section in the navigation above.)

The internet is said to have made a lot of people’s jobs more difficult. Record company bosses, for instance. Or insurance companies. Or publishers. Surely another should be added to the list: lexicographers.

I was thinking the other day about how quickly new words enter everyday vocabulary. Before the internet, language evolved slowly and often in geographical pockets. Now? It’s “chav” this and “wag” that and “spam” the other (not to mention omg, wtf, lol, btw). And the fact that I am blogging about this would befuddle the 1990s you.

In fact, spam proves the point quite well. Of course, spam has existed since the year dot as a strange canned meat product. But when you say spam today you think of unsolicited (usually commercial) email. The word spam was first used in this sense in the 1980s, yet it took until at least the late 1990s for it to become a household name.

Today? Some wise guy can invent some half-arsed new term and almost instantly it is all over the internet like a rash. Or a rasher (rashr?). Of bacn.

I first heard of bacn via Gordon McLean. When I saw it at his blog I thought it was pronounced like the word ‘back’ with a rogue ‘n’ at the end. I thought it looked a bit like the name for some dodgy quango. British Autocratic Complete Numpties? (Too honest a name to be a real quango I guess.)

I soon remembered that this is “the age of the stupid removal, for no good reason, of the penultimate letter of a word if the penultimate letter is a vowel and the last letter is a consonant”. This is thanks to those wise guys at Flickr. Wankrs the lot of them. So bacn is like bacon, except now you have to delete the ‘o’ when you accidentally type it out of habit.

I have since learned through Boing Boing that bacn is an overnight internets phenomenon. So what is this mysterious bacn?

Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

On Boing Boing it is described as “e-mail you want, just not now”.

The thing about this bacn thing, though, is that this is not really a phenomenon that I identify with. Spam is ubiquitous. We all know what it is. We all get it. We all hate it. Bacn? Not quite.

I can just about see it when it comes to the newsletter from my favourite company. But usually I just (skim) read them straight away so that they don’t pile up. I have signed up to The Economist’s newsletters, but I almost never read them. Hardly counts as “email you want”, even though I did ask for them. The exception is the indispensable Boomkat newsletter, which is one of the first things I read on a Friday.

So what about the rest of them — Twitter follower notifications, Facebook wall post notifications and the like? Well, I do want to know about them now. I just don’t want to read them.

Google Talk comes with a handy Gmail notifier which tells me whenever I get a new email. I can just look at the subject of the email and pretty much know what it is. Take three recent notifications that I received from three different websites:

• X sent you a message on Facebook
• X is now following you on Twitter
• Please confirm story about X [from Bebo]

In each case I did not want to read the email. What a waste of time. I just marked them as read the next time I logged into Gmail. But in each case I did visit the relevant website immediately to see what was going on.

Maybe I would understand more if I was an omg wtf busy 24/7 21^st century lifestyle stressed out city dude. But for me, bacn is not so much email that I want to put off reading until later. It’s email that I either want to read immediately (like the Boomkat newsletter), or not at all (Twitter followers).

In the space of two days, I received two emails from people who had posted comments that didn’t appear here. It turned out that Spam Karma had gobbled them up. Thankfully, they were recoverable. But I also discovered several other comments that had also been caught up!

I’m a bit annoyed about this, as I don’t know if this has been going on for a long time, or just for the past couple of days. It seems to have mainly affected people who have not posted many comments before.

So I’ll have a look into the matter, but at the moment it looks like I’m going to have to uninstall Spam Karma. Because not only is it catching legitimate comments, but it has also been letting spam comments through occasionally for a month or so now.

Spam Karma is having a tough time though. Recently this blog received its 100,000^th spam comment. This is in comparison to less than 2,000 blog posts and around 3,700 legitimate comments.

Update: Having had a look at the comments that I have recovered, I am guessing that quite a lot of comments have gone missing over quite a long period of time. I’m not certain about that, but that is my guess. If you’ve ever submitted a comment and been greeted by a blank screen after submitting it, your comment has probably been lost.

Thanks to Ali and Ollie for pointing this out to me.

Update: I’ve taken the opportunity to (at last) upgrade to WordPress 2.2. Just watch, WP 2.2.1 will come out tomorrow!

I was going to work on Scottish Roundup first, but since I’ve started on this blog now I will be doing some much-needed tinkering over the next couple of days.

Some absolute arsehole is using spoofing email addresses ending in @doctorvee.co.uk to send out spam emails. I can tell this because I was greeted with seventeen bounced emails in my inbox. Goodness knows how many more were sent out.

I guess I can count myself lucky that this hasn’t happened to me before. But I would just like to point out that I am not responsible for sending the emails. And from now on I will only receive emails that are sent to duncan [at] …, or my Gmail accounts. And those are the only addresses that I’ll send from aswell. All other email sent to other addresses ending in @doctorvee.co.uk will be sent to the interwebs-ether.

Boring admin alert: Stuff I’ve done tonight when I probably should have been revising but I was too tired to: Upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.5; Re-installed Bad Behaviour; Re-installed Spam Karma. I was getting too many spam comments (approaching 500 per day) for me to moderate, so I’ve decided to go all-out on it. So if your comments are swallowed up (or if you have any other problems), sorry! On the plus side, comments on old posts possibly won’t have to be moderated any more. Hurrah!