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Praetorium Honoris

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

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




20 comments:

  1. Defenestration is too good for those responsible for this..........(sigh).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarge, I knew the law, but never the attribution. I will use it as "Hanlon's Razor" going forward.

    I do wonder sometimes if Gargle is not necessarily doing anything, but allowing things to overgrow and degrade out of benign neglect - after all, this cannot be a money maker for them at this point.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gargle also likes to let their programmers "experiment." (My son interviewed there, didn't care for it at all.) Often they muck something up then move on, maybe fixing it if enough people complain.

      Oddly enough, today's first comment on this post was a spam "I'm making A$90/hour from home" spam mails.

      Ironic, neh?

      Delete
  3. There is a mental illness that takes something that works perfectly, and continually dinks with it to make it "better". I got a phone up date that moved the url field to the BOTTOM of the frickin browser. I finally figured out what happened (how can I lose something on a tiny screen?). They play with stuff so much, just "make it different enough this update so the boss knows I'm working", that they will inevitably brick it. It's like they make everything into Medusa's garden gnomes but only a cubic inch per update. Eventually, it'll all be bricked, but just here a little, there a little. Then, a whole leg is brick and it hobbles around until the other hip is brick, then it falls over and wiggles, but it is still not "mostly dead", so there is still a useful function to "update".... uh oh, it's a brick... Barstewards, the lot of them....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You hit the nail squarely on the head. What's called a "shack" in the military aviation world.

      Delete
  4. I don't get the actual money making of spamming. (Versus the advertised). I don't think many people (people defined as intelligent and with money) click on any of those "Ads". I do think those "Ads" have a high potential for hacking. IMHO hacking is, or should be, illegal and the hosting agencies should assist in the prosecution of those "Ad agencies". I also have a hard time believing that filtering them out is too hard for the hosting agencies to block them. Not to advertise or recommend, but I have noticed that "Those Ads" seem to be less frequent on Firefox than on other browsers, not non-existent, just less frequent. On the search engine side, DuckDuckGo is WAY better than that G-Word one for filtering out spam sites. Again, not perfect, just less frequent.
    YMMV. Peace...Out!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do believe these idiot spammers are paid (by someone, who knows who?) for each time someone actually hits that website. It's not much but think about it, spam a million places, you're bound to get at least 10% who actually hit the button. The ads aren't targeted at "people defined as intelligent and with money," quite the opposite. Stealing a million bucks from one person is hard, stealing a dollar from a million people just requires legwork.

      I read that somewhere, that is, the rationale behind these spamming emails. I also believe that hacking should be a capital crime. Maybe that's just me.

      Delete
    2. Certainly NOT just you, Sarge. Not only a capital crime but the proscription against "cruel and unusual" should be waived. These people should be set on fire.
      Boat Guy

      Delete
  5. OTOH considering just how stupid and annoying these soi-disant "Ads" are and considering that I have a slight (100%) paranoid streak, could this be a psyop against ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If it is, it ain't working. All they have done is "awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve." Or words to that effect.

      Delete
  6. From observation and talking to our Infosec guys, the scammers intentionally send out messages with bad English. If you ignore the warning signs (bad English, improbable pay or returns, etc.) and click on the link you are probably the mark they are looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Don't feel like the Lone Ranger. Spam is a pox upon the internet when strangers are allowed to comment, and has been for years. The "I'm getting rich..." crap is everywhere. It could be worse, back when I had some forums up, we were inundated with assorted spam crap, some of it with images, mostly offensive. We eventually shut down the forums rather than waste the hours needed to take out the garbage.

    It seems the spam infestations are less on Blogger type sites than open forums, confirming that your plight could be worse, although that is slight comfort when Lizzie or whomever is filling your inbox.

    Thanks for all the fine writing we enjoy, and the behind the scenes drudgery we never see.
    John Blackshoe

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Internet has provided a way for anti-social types to harass people anonymously. They are, at heart, cowardly bastards who, if they behaved that way in public, know they would get their asses kicked. Rightly so.

      It's an annoyance, a true "First World Problem."

      Delete
  8. If you have "ALL" selected you will still see the shit you just marked as spam. Select "Published" and they disappear like they should.

    It used to default to "Published" but now it defaults to "ALL" with a default to "awaiting moderation" if you have comments in the moderation queue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, that's not the issue. The issue is that comments marked as spam return again and again. Blogger is broken.

      Delete
  9. Price of success? My small corner of the blog world gets one to two a month.

    ReplyDelete

Just be polite... that's all I ask. (For Buck)
Can't be nice, go somewhere else...

NOTE: Comments on posts over 5 days old go into moderation, automatically.