Shannon’s comment on my last post got moderated as spam (appropriately enough 🙂 ), and I mistakenly filed it as spam. All of which led me back to the Spam Karma admin tab to retrieve her magical comment.
When I got there I noticed that since my last Spam purge a few months ago, I have accumulated over 85,000 comments, 84,238 of which are spam. Of this number 651 were moderated, and only a handful actually got through (I would say two or three a week). Like the History Channel special “Life After People” Bryan Alexander linked to today, I started to wonder what the blogosphere would look like without spam filters. The internecine struggle reminds me of the classic story “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” except the man vs. nature theme doesn’t really work so well anymore.
In fact, it would be utterly impossible to host your own own WordPress blog if it weren’t for Dave’s brilliant Spam Karma plugin (or others like it). I would have to spend all my time fighting evil spammers, leaving little or no time for actually blogging. Having realized that I owe the ability to blog comfortably from my own server to Dave makes me want to actually do something for him in return. So, as I am trying to do more of these days, I am going to make a donation to him, it may be nominal given how much his plugin does for me on daily basis, but it certainly is a start.
Thanks Dave, for creating an excellent plugin that allows me to publish my inanities relatively free of spam, I couldn’t do it without you!
I’ve been thinking about the idea of a “deadman’s switch” – a piece of software that does a bunch of things automatically if I die. It could post a final blog entry, disable comments, send some emails, etc…
the problem is, how do you tell the software that you’re dead? If you set it to a timeout (watching for traces of activity of you) then you can’t take that wonderful 2-month trek through the himalayas, because the bot will declare you dead before you return…
So, I made my donation and it looks like I donated to “Dr Dave’s Funds Against Hunger in the World.” Amazing, I have to say that Dr. Dave, despite his disaffection from the Web 2.0 hype, is the closest I have seen to a developer saint 🙂
That is so morbid D’Arcy, I love it. You should post the idea, and Bryan will blog it, and maybe Spam Karma Dave can help develop it.
I would imagine people could designate a trusted friend to become their digital executor to clean things up after their demise. There could a sealed envelop with admin passwords and secret caches….
well, yeah… assuming you can trust someone with all of your passwords…
I hereby designate Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman as my digital executors should I die unexpectedly. Upon my demise a sealed envelope will be sent to both of you containing all my secret caches and my paypal password:)
P.S. — I hope jesting like this isn’t a bad omen. Do I need to say psych or something like that, or is a smiley face enough?
@jim: save the postage and just post your account info here…
Wow, how did this comment thread turn from praising a developer saint to making plans for digital executors? I hope you’ve said psych already.
I just want to chime in with my own thanks for Dave’s Spam Karma plug-in–and to say I need to make a donation, too. His work makes my work possible. Thanks for the post, Jim.