Saturday, July 25, 2009

Moderation in Some, But Not All, Things

I'm turning on comment moderation so I can decrease the amount of Chinese-language spam appearing in the Comment trail.

I've been reluctant to do this, but the Chinese spam is relentless and it's no longer amusing. In addition, it links to utterly boring sites; the most recent, to take a single example, appears to be a dermatology clinic. This isn't one of those dermatology sites that shows truly horrendous skin conditions that make you want to take bleach to your computer screen afterwards (and possibly rub bleach into your eyes just to be safe). No, this is a site that shows a lot of slight blemishes that are somewhat ameliorated by a combination of treatment and Photoshop.

I suppose a Chinese Certified Public Accountant webpage would be more more boring, but only slightly. I never thought anything could make me view penis-enlargement techniques, Canadian pharmaceuticals, and fake Rolex offers as a sort of golden age, but these folks have managed.

So, my apologies: there will now be a delay between the time you post your comments and when they appear on the blog. And, just so I don't get confused and delete your legitimate comments by accident, I urge you to avoid making your comments in Chinese ideograms. (If you can't resist making your comments in Chinese, please use Pinyin.)

2 comments:

Jamie Ford said...

I'll try to keep the restore you hair and penile virility comments to a minimum. Though offer expires soon.

I get the same stuff, but a lot of Russian spam as well (or stuff that I perceive as Russian, maybe it's Belarusian, etc).

David Isaak said...

Hi, Jamie--

The Cyrillic stuff I at least might have a chance of puzzling out without clicking through. (I had a couple of years of Russian in undergraduate school, though most of it has mysteriously vanished from my brain tissue.) Chinese characters, on the other hand, convey nothing to my mind. China's Ministry of Petroleum was nice enough to give me a chop with my name in Chinese characters, but I still can't reliably recognize my own name.

Or, at least they told me it was my name. For all I know, it might say "Round-eyed Twit," or even "Kick me."