Darn it, enough with the phony comments: a man’s blog is his castle

Every morning after I get out of bed & do my morning routine, sit down with a cup of coffee, turn on “Morning Joe” and my computer—I see several of these in my inbox:

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2019 5:59 AM
To: edougmorris@gmail.com
Subject: [ApacheDug's Teepee] New comment on Chocolate teepees and my so-called secrets of weight loss

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Chocolate teepees and my so-called secrets of weight loss":
 
I have been surfing on-line greater than 3 hours today, but I by no means discovered any interesting article like yours. It is pretty value sufficient for me.  Personally, if all web owners and bloggers made excellent content as you did, the net will probably be a lot more helpful than ever before.
   
It’s not real; it’s generic crap, it’s spam.   And during the day, I’ll get 7-8 more.  (That chocolate teepee post recently got several of these phony comments, I wonder why that is?   It’s probably why that chocolate post is at the top of my “Revisited Posts” in my sidebar.  I have no control over that.)

Anyway… it’s getting to be a real drag.  I read every one, just in case someone “real” is commenting.  It’s not like these spam comments contain links to some nefarious site, I read up on the innocuous ones I get and I still don’t understand it.  Something about low-life websites posting benign comments to spread themselves out, grow tentacles in the googleverse. 

I don’t know how it works, but I get it—I know that if I visit someone’s blog & leave a comment (a REAL one), if it asks me to include my website I always do.  Nothing like a little self promotion!

I’ve done my best to keep the spam off my personal blog—I changed the settings to ask my permission before publishing a comment on a post older than 30 days.  When that didn’t work, I set it to ask me first before publishing a comment on ANY post.  And when that still didn’t stop ‘em, I changed it to do a “bot check”, which DID work. 

But when I tested it by attempting to publish a dummy comment on my own blog, it required me to jump thru so many hoops “Place an X on every tree in this photo to prove you’re not a bot” I failed it every time!  No one’s going to go thru all that crap just to let me know they read my blog about my latest kidney stone!

ENOUGH.  I think I have little choice but to remove the ‘Leave a comment’ below.  It’s not like I get many anyway… and that’s okay.   I admit, I enjoy the occasional feedback.  Hey, someone actually read my blog about why I left Facebook!  but I don’t expect them.   This isn’t a specialty or entertainment blog, and I’m certainly no Erma Bombeck or Garrison Keillor.


All this talk about SPAM has reminded me I haven’t had the canned stuff since… I dunno, the 70s?   I think I need to pick up a can this week.  Do they still have those little keys on them?

Omigod, I just proofread this—it’s the most boring thing I’ve ever written… right? 

So I think I may wait a day or two and turn them off.  Honestly, I don’t know if anyone even READS this stuff (besides a daily visitor or two & my sister Shawn, when I post new movie reviews on Fridays).  I have a flooky visitors map on the sidebar that lets me know if someone has been here, but it doesn’t even work right. 
If my sister (from Greene County, PA) gets on here, it shows her location as ‘Chagrin Falls, Ohio’.  Er.. that’s not even close!  

For all I know, I’m pretty much talking to an empty room.  Again, that’s okay;  living alone as long as I have, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.