Are You Ready to DeLurk?
Published January 14th, 2007 in blogging, blogsToby Buckell has a post about National DeLurking Week. I’d never heard of this, but he got it from John Scalzi, so it must be true! I can’t give you money or even donate to your favorite charity for leaving a comment here and thereby delurking, but I’d honestly love to hear from you. I know I have a few regular readers at least who have probably never left a comment here.
Now’s a great time for you to step out of the shadows for just a moment and say “hi” to me and all the other readers of Fresh Blogger. If you need more of a purpose to comment here, tell me what you’d like to see more of on this blog in 2007. I’m still trying to figure out exactly where I want to go this year with my online pursuits, so any input will be a great help.
I saw mention of this over on Copyblogger in one of the comments.
My immediate thoughts were
“What a great way for a comment spammer to justify spamming”
You could easily write a line like
“As it is national delurking week I have decided to come out of the shadows and congratulate you on a great blog to which I have been a subscriber for a few months”
Then use your blogspam tools for any mention of delurking in the posts
I encourage people to comment by giving them real backlinks from both comments and trackbacks. I don’t think it is a good idea to give them a hook to search for.
Hi Andy. You make a good point, but I think that danger is always there. The spammers are getting more and more clever every day, it seems. I go through the comment spams that Aksimet traps on a daily basis and there are quite often a couple that I have to take a step back and think about before deleting.
My usual criteria is that if there are links in the body of the comment, I usually delete it. If the web address linked to in the name part just goes to a spam site, again, I delete it. If ever I’m in doubt, I check out the site before allowing the comment. I guess it’s the price of blogging these days that you have to be extremely vigilant against any forms of comment spam.
I’ve modified Fresh Blogger to allow real links in the comments, too, and actually your writing has influenced me in that regard. I don’t think this type of post presents much more danger of attracting spam than others I’ve written, though. I’ve actually written a couple of other spam bait posts and the spammer response has been manageable. Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment. I really appreciate your joining the conversation.