Way back in my LiveJournal days… I mean back when everyone seemed to be using LiveJournal and it was hard to keep up with all the posts… I remember how thrilled I was when I opened my Inbox and saw a string of comments from my LJ friends in response to a journal entry I’d written. There was just something so wonderful about that connection I’d made with a bunch of seemingly random strangers – we had found each other, and were now getting to know each other through our written words. Fabulous!
I experienced that again, albeit to a lesser degree, when I moved over to my public Blogger blogs, and am slowly starting to see it on my newly self-hosted WordPress blogs. I still love the connection with people who’ve stumbled across my posts, and I still adore that little thrill when someone sends me a comment.
BUT (you knew there had to be a but, right?)…
The spambots are starting to suck the joy out of the process! These days when I see a string of comments from WordPress sitting in my Inbox, the vast majority of them are more than likely to be from spammers trying to sell goods or services to me and my readers, or show us their X-rated pictures and videos, rather than real-life people who actually care about or want to comment on what I’ve written. It’s frustrating and depressing and angry-making, and I’m beyond tired of it.
The silver lining, I suppose, is that when I do get a “real” comment, the fact that it’s NOT from a spambot makes it all the more wonderful, so there is that!
OK, rant over. But if any of my readers can recommend a WordPress plugin that will help to minimize this annoying issue without making it irritating for actual, real commenters to interact on my blog, I’m all ears.
Until then, I’ll keep my cursor poised over the Spam button, and hope that some day the real commenters will outweigh the !@#$%^&* spambots.
Le sigh.
