Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Spam Bloggers and Spamming Bloggers

Blogger reports that today's posting problem was due to "a bunch of spammers creating spam blogs at a high-rate." With all the problems in the world today, you'd think people with so much energy and talent could be able to put it toward some useful purpose rather than pointlessly frittering it away.

I've received a disproportionately high number of blog-spammers myself of late in my email in-box, wanting to "exchange links" with me. Most of them are also wasting my time, and I'm getting tired of responding to them. Therefore, the following is my policy on link exchanges, and I'm putting up a link to this post from my sidebar so that anyone with half a brain can read it before approaching me, assuming they're not lying when they say they've looked at my blog:

1) If you are selling something, I'm not interested. Go away and spam me no more. Look down my sidebar a bit and you'll see the little icon indicating that this is a no-ads blog. I don't know what you've been told, but not everyone is interested in making money blogging. As I have written time and again, this is a hobby for me; I don't shell out a single cent to blog, I give of my valuable time willingly because I enjoy it, and I have no intention of ever asking anyone else to pay for my hobby. Kindly look elsewhere for greedier people. I'm sure you can find them, even in liberal circles there are tons of blogging hobbyists begging their readers for money. I'm not one of them.

2) If you are providing a free service in which you think Pen-Elayne readers might have interest, I welcome your email; include your URL and I'll check it out. No promises, but generally I have no problem letting folks know about stuff like that.

3) If you're just a regular ol' blogger like me, well, that's an actual link exchange. So please write and ask, particularly if I'm already on your blogroll. (Remember, as I read blogs via Bloglines I don't actually click on the sites themselves so I have no way of knowing if I'm on your blogroll unless you tell me.) And my answer will almost always be along the lines of "probably, but give me awhile to get to know your blog first by putting it on my Bloglines bookmarks and checking it out that way, then if you still don't see it on my sidebar after a few months feel free to give me a nudge." My sidebar, she is a pendulous and unwieldy thing, to which I'm not actively looking to add, but neither am I inclined to be rude to new writers trying to become better known. I was there once m'self, after all (some would say I still am).

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