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After speaking with several of my fellow bloggers, I found out I am not the only blog who has been getting absolutely hammered with spam recently. Over the last week or two, I have been averaging probably 20-30 spam comments or trackbacks an hour. For all you WordPress users out there, I can tell you that Akismet rocks. If you are not familiar with it, it is a spam plugin that comes bundled with WordPress. All you need to do is go to your plugin section and activate it and then configure it. It is incredibly easy and it has been perfect so far with catching all spam and allowing real comments through without issue. If you have any issues, let me know, be glad to help.

In the world today, there are so many different opinions on issues that at times it seems like no-one can agree on anything. Though there seems to be one issue that we all can agree on without hesitation, our hatred and loathing for spam. I have not seen to date anyone stand up and say, “I am a fan of spam!”. A little over two years ago, Bill Gates got up in front of the Davos World Economic Forum and said that “Two years from now, spam will be solved”. Yea, you seemed to miss the mark big time on that hey Bill? Especially since in my Hotmail account, I get easily 10-20 pieces of spam to every one legitimate email.

No matter what Bill says, the amount of spam that is being sent out right now is at an all time high. There has already been legislation put into place which includes fines and even imprisonment for spammers. The problem is that lawmakers don’t realize that the web has no boundaries while our laws do. So a spammer is Russia is not going to be too concerned about US laws.

The war on spam reminds me of another absolutely failed war which is the war on drugs. We have spent billions upon billions of dollars to lock up drug dealers, but never coming to the realization like spam, that it all comes down to the simple rule of supply and demand. If there were no people interested in purchasing drugs, there would be no drug dealers because they could not make money, no customers. I believe spam is very similar. If people would begin educating themselves on spam, learn the basic rules of how to recognize and handle spam and not click on their spam links that they get in their emails, spam would go away as well.

Supply and demand, if the spammers cannot make money on what they are doing, they are not going to do it. So the next time you are complaining about spam, ask yourself are you really deterring spam or are you just part of the problem?

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Technorati Tags: spam, WordPress, Akismet, Bill Gates