Pretty Tired of This Shite ...

I, and many others, have been getting these "make money from home" spam emails for a while now. Used to be, they'd spam every post in the last week or so, lately they come in threes. They all used to come from a fictitious individual yclept "Sarah Elizabeth." They now come from multiple sources, Joyce Nelson merely being the latest in a scam dating back a couple of months.

I can mark them as spam, but that has zero effect. To understand how that is supposed to work, let's go behind the scenes.

Now within that circle above is an inverted triangle, that's a pulldown. If I click on that, I can manage the comments on the blog, back to the very beginning as a matter of fact. If I click on that triangle, I get this:

In the illustration above I have selected the pulldown and placed my cursor over the comment at the top of the page. Which presents three buttons (which I've labeled for you):

You can manage a single comment, or you can manage multiple comments at once by selecting "MANAGE," which brings you here:

Selecting multiple comments (by clicking on the poster's icon) you can Remove, Mark as Spam or Remove Content of a comment. "Remove content of this comment," leaves a "This comment deleted" marker which the reader can see in the comments section of the post. I only use this to demonstrate my annoyance. If I'm telling a reader that their comment didn't abide by the rules, I delete the content, then comment on that deletion.

Now I can delete a comment (you can actually delete your own comment) by selecting "Delete" within the body of comments under the post, this will ask if I want to kill it forever (you don't get that option) or just delete the content, leaving the empty shell in it's place with that "This comment deleted" marker. If it's killed forever, it is gone completely, shell and all.

The "Delete this comment" button shown above is permanent, nothing remains.

But "Mark this comment as spam"" is why we're here. Used to be that marking a comment as spam would remove it from the visible comments section and stick it in the Spam folder (selectable from the pulldown). Well, it doesn't do that anymore, near as I can tell, the button does nothing. To kill the spam I actually have to delete it. Which doesn't alert Gargle to mark all future comments of this type as spam and tells Gargle "don't effing show them to me."

Like I said, that's broken. I provided feedback to Gargle, screenshots and everything, and it's still broken. Now Gargle is going through all of my 2014 posts and marking anything with a one word or two word comment as "Spam." So then I have to go liberate them from the Spam bucket or they will no longer be visible on that post.

Do I think this is some evil plot on a grand scale?

Nope, I usually apply Hanlon's razor to things like this.

What's Hanlon's razor you ask?

Glad you asked, it states ...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Of course, there are times when malice and stupidity go forth hand in hand. Is this one? Given the state of the nation right now, who knows?

But that's politics, a topic I abhor.

/rant