I’m turning off askimet.
I know. You all must be thinking, “Fracas has finally lost it.” I assure you though, I’m quite alright and have seriously thought this through.
You see, although many of us have been trained to think we need askimet there in the background, protecting us from all those evil spam comments as though they were smallpox-bearing settlers arriving on the shores of our blogs, I have a good argument to the contrary.
Once upon a time when the fraccy blog was new, I would pore over the comments that had been exiled there, fearful of accidentally leaving a genuine reader’s comment in there and thus condemning them to perpetual status as a spammer once the auto-delete feature had sent their email address on to the askimet gurus. That was then, though, and when you’re pretty sure your entire readership can be counted on your fingers and toes… you don’t have that many spam in the bin anyway. With an average of 10% of the hits to this blog being spam, ‘poring’ over them daily (back then) took about three whole seconds.
These days, I usually don’t bother checking the spam bin, unless someone I know has informed me that they’ve commented and they’re being held in the aski-gulag. (I free them of course.)
So imagine my shock tonight when I decided to have a peek at what’s in there. I don’t know why I wanted to, but whatever the reason, I learned a lesson about taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering.
There, suffering away in the spam bin, was this precious (and so very truthful… certainly left by some dear, wise old soul no doubt) comment.
“Really i am impressed from this post….the person who create this post he is a great human..thanks for shared this with us.”
Do you all understand the gravity of this? This wonderful, kindhearted person took time away from their (obviously) very busy internet business selling watches and jewelery… just to leave this comment for me, and I (the awful person that I am) allowed askimet to treat them like a common criminal (or door to door salesman – whichever is worse) as their reward. In shame, I made a vow to turn off askimet and never, ever deprive these lovely people from the opportunity to share their wisdom with the fraccy readers again.
I can’t believe the people who created askimet would have sold us this bill of goods and deprived us of this kind of love and affection from our readers and fans.
I hope you, like me, decide to turn askimet off. Perhaps then you too will experience the same level of love and appreciation as I was so fortunate as to rescue from my bin tonight.
Try it. Go check your bin. I bet you find some warm fuzzies too.
Always happy to be of service to all of you…
[Image source: Public Domain Pictures]
