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.)

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).

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.

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.

If it looks bad you can blame my family, okay, cos they’re the ones that look at the designs before I upload them. I experimented by swapping the black and the white around (i.e. black text on white background), but it didn’t look as good and my mum said she couldn’t read it as easily.

I’ve separated comments and trackbacks using a nifty trick which I learned at Cre8d which I discovered at Gordon McLean’s. Trackback and pingback extracts no longer show up, but I won’t lose any sleep over that because they were always unreadable and you’ve got a link to the full post anyway. The only thing is that you can’t tell which pingbacks were actually generated by the Kramer plugin. They don’t show up well in general, so if you see a heading that says ’13 comments’ but there are actually 10 comments and 5 trackbacks, two of the trackbacks were from Technorati. Not great, I know, but I’m sure you’ll survive…

In the process I’ve also tried to make comments look nicer generally. I always find the comments section by far the most difficult part of the site to design. I don’t know why. I’ve also finally got round to getting ‘official’ comments sorted, so when I’m in the comments you know it’s me for sure because my words appear in a bright blue box.

And on to the bit that actually made me write this post. I need to apologise for the random Chinese spam that keeps on showing up. For some reason, although all the anti-spam gizmos I’ve installed work really well in general, they seem pretty back at tackling these Chinese ones. At least they only appear one or two at a time for the moment.

Anyway, that’s it. You know I had loads to write at the start of the week, and not enough time to write it. Now I’ve forgotten it all, or it’s less salient, or I just can’t be arsed blogging. Gah. I’ll write something decent soon.

Update: Forgot to say that I updated the links page.

It’s good to get that out of the way though. I spent the past half week or so trying to do as little as possible in order to squeeze as much time as I could out of that bandwidth!…