Penile extenders and scrapbooking

fhb is beginning to pick up comment spam, whether as a sign of its growing popularity or of desperation on the part of the spammers, I don't know. The spam is obviously automated, as it's targeting key words in posts. Ironically, most of the hits have been directed to an unpublished article I wrote over a year ago on the origins of spam, which at last count had seven instances of comment spam, all now deleted. The latest one offered the reader information on penile extenders.

A piece of spam was also dropped over the weekend on a poker post where, as an aside, I had mentioned scrapbooking. The comment, assuring me that fhb was in its top three list of "must-read" blogs, also directed the reader to a "How to make big money from scrapbooking" site. It's gone now, too.

So far it's more of an annoyance than a problem. If needed, I can turn on "word verification," a feature recently added to Blogger, where commenters must read and replicate some random group of letters before their comments will be posted. That's a PIA, of course, and I won't do it unless I start spending an inordinate amount of time deleting comment spam. It'll be interesting to see how many instances this post picks up between the title and key words.

While we're on the subject of comments, Tracy Mark Lee, owner and operator of Electric Tiki Design dropped by over the weekend to respond to my rant about his Web site. He left a good-natured comment, which I appreciate (not least since he didn't take me to task for calling him "Terry" later in my post), given that I was probably more harsh than I needed to be. It's a good thing to be reminded at times that you're not operating in a vacuum when blogging; that you're writing about real people with feelings of their own. In any case, Electric Tiki is more than worth a look if you're interested in beautiful TV/comic-related statues. I mean, God, look at this.

It's still a terrible site to navigate through, though, and I wish Tracy would get someone to fix it. His work deserves a better venue in cyberspace.