One of my sons normally takes care of a lot of the day-to-day maintenance associated with my website, blog, and wiki; but he’s off on a well-deserved vacation in Cancun (where it’s raining!), so I’m stuck with these chores myself for a few days.

One of the interesting chores involves monitoring the comments that people post to my pithy blog postings — the overwhelming majority of which turn out to be spam. Not just innocent “buy this stock and get rich!” spam, but fairly disgusting, hard-core porn spam. At the moment, I’m getting about 200 such spam postings a day; in addition to invitations to participate in every conceivable form of deviant sex (and quite a few inconceivable ones: goats? chickens? frogs? jeez, I can’t even imagine kissing a frog!), there are quite a few people who would like to sell me some Viagra, or some pills to calm me down, speed me up, or turn me into a babbling idiot who wouldn’t care what was going on. Lots of advertisements for video games, and a few marriage proposals from beautiful, beautiful women (or so they claim) in Irkutsk. So far, there have been no Nigerian “409″ spam postings, offering to send me several million dollars if I’ll just send along the details of my bank account number, phone number, and fax number … but it’s probably only a matter of time before they show up.

It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone could be interested in any of these so-called “offers,” but I assume the spammers wouldn’t go to such effort unless they managed to snare at least a few victims. In this case, though, they have to assume that (a) the owner of a blog site — e.g., someone like me — would be naive enough, and/or lazy enough, to allow such “comments” to be posted on the blog, (b) people who read the blog site would be industrious enough to wade through page after page of porno-comments, and (c) after having seen them, such visitors to the blog site would actually be tempted to click on one of the links. It does make you wonder what kind of odds the spammers need to make a profit: one click-through per million spam-comments? One per 10 million? One per 100 hundred million?

In any case, all of the comments that someone attempts to post on my blog, in response to any of my articles, must first be approved by a “moderator” — nominally my son, but me for the next few days. And hopefully, none of them will ever be visible to you. So if you’re in desperate need of Viagra, or feel a sordid desire for sex with a barnyard animal, you’ll have to go looking elsewhere…