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Chinese spam is a lot like American spam

Cans of Spam line the shelves at a store in Berlin, Vt. Sales of Spam are rising as consumers turn more to lunch meats and lower-cost foods as a way of stretching their already stretched food budgets. Associated Press photos (Associated Press photos / The Spokesman-Review)
Cans of Spam line the shelves at a store in Berlin, Vt. Sales of Spam are rising as consumers turn more to lunch meats and lower-cost foods as a way of stretching their already stretched food budgets. Associated Press photos (Associated Press photos / The Spokesman-Review)

Ryan Pitts, Senior Editor- Digital Media writes:

In recent months, our website has started to get hit by Chinese spam. We haven't had to deal with much spam at all after switching to the new Spokesman.com, now that commenting requires a registered account and includes a preview screen. So the odds are, these are *actual* people on the other end, registering a new account each day, and then copying and pasting spam comments under our stories. It's very tough to stop that kind of real human activity. They tend to show up around 5:30 in the afternoons, and sometimes again early mornings around 6 a.m.
 
To keep this crap off our site, today we hooked into an anti-spam filter called Akismet. It takes things like IP address, comment text, etc., and runs them through a pretty effective spam filter. If Akismet tells us that a comment looks like spam, we can keep it from ever posting to the site. I don't *think* we'll have much trouble with this spam filter catching legitimate messages, but anytime a comment gets marked as spam, the reader does have the opportunity to revise it.
 
I'm hoping that no one on HBO will ever notice the spam filter is in place. That means it's doing its job well. But if you do see your real comments getting marked as spam, *please* let me know at ryanp@spokesman.com. Thanks.
Do you get much spam?
Huckleberries Online

D.F. Oliveria started Huckleberries Online on Feb. 16, 2004. Oliveria's Sunday print Huckleberries is a past winner of the national Herb Caen Memorial Column contest.