A few months ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post on 7 habits of highly effective travel blog stalkers. Ironically enough, people started stalking me after that, which made me feel happy since I am an attention whore.

This has however increased the number of spam comments I’ve received. I didn’t mind at first because I found it flattering that spammers would choose my blog over literally, millions of other blogs out there. I did eventually grow tired of comments such as “Hey I just had a threesome. Check out www.beautifulbustybabes.com”. I mean, really? I was writing about how I didn’t get any hugs for a month and you just needed to rub it in my face that you had relations with two well-endowed women? That’s low. You don’t see me going to porn sites, posting comments like “Hey I was just drunk in Mykonos today. Check out my travel blog.”

Even worse, I’ve recently noticed a new generation of spammers. I call them Lovely Spammers. These guys actually write nice, thoughtful comments but then post links to completely irrelevant commercial sites. For example: “Looks like you had a great time in Riga. I would love to visit the Baltics one day. My recent post: Buy some shitty software which is probably a virus.”
Why the mixed signals? I thought we had a special connection.

I added the CommentLuv plug-in to help promote my fellow bloggers and because I like reading about other people’s adventures. It was never my intention to turn it into a seedy black-market where people could peddle their dubious wares or use my blog like a whore for SEO purposes (I mean it’s bad enough already that I do it myself with Google Adwords). Therefore after much deliberation, I’ve decided that I will delete (and have deleted) all comments which use a business name instead of a human name or advertises a recent post which is clearly pointless or spammy. I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m trying to save your effort. Note: This does not affect 99.9% of my commenters (I :heart: you).

So what is the 8th Habit? It is Hide Your Junk. Would you visit someone’s house to say hi, then on your way out take a dump on their couch? (I hope not!) Well, that’s how it feels when someone writes a lovely comment but then take a virtual shit by promoting their business/ebook/salad-tossing services. How about this for an idea: use a real name, and don’t use the recent post feature if it’s a commercial post. Then if the comment is relevant, you have a good chance it’ll stay up and you still benefit from your name being linked to your homepage. Because you know, I still like the attention.

How do you deal with Lovely Spammers?