One of the ‘benefits’ of running a massive blog hosting site like Edublogs is that you get a lot of day to day content with sploggers – general no good scumballs who use up your resources, waste your time and try to pollute your site.

In fact I’ve been dealing with the swine since the inception of what was WordPress MU, so I know a thing or two about their ways.

Which, in  no small part, contributed to the development of Anti Splog, which as well as throwing up a heap of serious barriers to splog signups and ongoing posting, presents the splogger, after their blog has been creamed, with the following invitation:

And you *would not believe* the submissions that we, a blog network that pride ourselves on *only* offering educational or educational related blogs, get!

For example, just today (a Sunday for most folk!), we have had no fewer than 39 requests for reviews, with completed reasons, from sites ranging from freeprintablegrocerycoupons.edublogs.org to cypruscompanyformation.edublogs.org and one of my favorites, for today – goldandsilver8.edublogs.org who protested:

not spam, educational guide to selling gold

Heh :)

But it gets much better, you see while Anti Splog blocks an amazing number of splog signups through various clever means, a bunch still get through on different IPs basically created by humans, only to find their content spammed a few posts into the splog as AS has either picked up a pattern (via our API) or some of the other several thousand users out there has caught them.

This can lead to them getting quite unhappy:

the reason is just i am good looking person :P But okey, lets do the captcha!

Sorry fella but the caption, or looks, didn’t quite cut it :)

 I am human

Clearly, but…

I am innocent! Why do you think my blog is spam? Give me a reason!

You can’t handle the truth!

And so on…

But sometimes, they even tug at your heart strings:

Some of the articles are really searched on the Internet because I think them good articles and wanted to share with others.I really didn`t know your rules before.However, I do spent so much time on my blog.What`s more,many of my articles recorded my diarylife.I really don`t want to lose them.

Please,please,please….unspam my blog.

What rules should I obey if I want to share some good articles in the blog?

And if you just don`t allow me upload any quoted articles ,I will not quote again.

Just reopen my blog again,let me see my articles again.Some are so important to me.

Hope,hope,hope!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which reminds you that even though they are no doubt employed by evil overlords, most of these poor guys are working for a pittance on MTurk or similar :/

I mean these are real folk, clearly, lots of them employed – most likely on a results basis – to create and maintain these sites.

Not machines, just kids, in developing countries, getting exploited for pennies.

Still, they’ve taken up at least a few percentage points of my life for the last half a decade or so… so f*ck em ;) Bloody sploggers.

Spam robot CC Dan Jones