I dunno. It may be cathartic for you. But I don't think it will enrage spammers that you allow spam posting but remove links. Do you really think they're checking back on your blog to test their posts? I doubt they'll waste their time.
Posting spammers' e-mail addresses is counterproductive too. 99 percent of the time they've hijacked someone else's legitimate address. So if you try to get "revenge" by encouraging people to flame those addresses, you're only punishing the victims.
The email address in the "From:" field usually isn't even hijacked - email is insecure and you can put in anyone's return address.
What this will mainly do is expose these addresses more, resulting in more spam sent to them (regardless of whether these addresses are owned by soammers or innocents).
I don't want to block anyone from having a voice on my blog, and that goes for the folks who want to leave dumbass comments as well.
I can see that, but spammers aren't even leaving dumbass comments, they're at best only PRETENDING to leave a comment related to the topic - the only reason they post is to promote their links. That's the ONLY reason. And that I delete completely without the first twinge of regret or remorse.
At least a dumbass cares about your topic (unless it's a troll, which is a whole nuther subject).
Deciding that spammers should automatically be removed seems a bit control-freakish,
NOT AT ALL. Spam is the equivalent of stealing your printer and paper to print out advertisiing flyers to put on windshields in a parking lot.
The blog and its commenting feature is a service made available to you by the blog site for your use. Letting spammer posts stand is like letting others put advertising bumper stickers on your car.
although I do take out all of the links they helpfully include...
Then do you understand that changing the links is equivalent to deleting the spam? What you're left with is effectively advertising copy (written by a "chickenboner," a technical term for a spammer) - the spammer will never come back to see if things are changed.
I'm still thinking on how I could use the comments in some way (save for the obvious mass e-mail bombardment back to them). I don't want to descend to their level, but I don't want to pretend they don't exist either.
Are your comments moderated, or do they show up immediately? My comments (when I used to have them - maybe I should post another entry or two) are moderated. Legitimate comments get posted when I see them, and spam comments NEVER see the light of day. No one ever sees a spam link in the comments on MY blog. That's my best defense against spammers.
If you want to leave the spam posted, DO change the links - you might want to change the spam links to this:
http://spam.abuse.net
It's more about email (and Usenet) spam, but most of the concepts apply.
I know the anger against spammers, I've had it since my first email spam in 1996. Here's a site describing email spam, though some of the concepts are applicable to other types of spam:
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l
Hmm, looks like that list was shut down and there's another one started up, but the FAQ is still there. Things like tracking IP addresses COULD be useful, except that, as far as I've seen, blog posts and comments don't have these available to users.
Spammers would surely feel honored to get some kind of attention from any blogger.
They don't give a flying donut as long as the payload, their links. Sometimes the whole text is in the payload, such as religious or political spam, in which case the comment would only see the light of day on my blog ONLY as the topic of a blog post, and likely "disemvoweled."
). I just need to know the legalities of doing this.
