A brief experiment in user registration. Goodbye vanderpoo.

man wearing brown suit jacket mocking on white telephone
Literally the only image that comes up when I search “spam” on Pexels. Photo by Moose Photos on Pexels.com

After getting nothing but spam accounts endlessly registering on this site (but unable to post because the first post any account makes must be manually approved by me before it can post freely afterwards), I shut off registrations altogether. My blog–this site–officially became me shouting into the void, with people unable to directly comment or cajole.

Today, I ran an experiment: I once again allowed user registrations.

Within moments, a new user had registered: clintonvanderpoo

Yeah.

I mean, I kind of like how the name is sort of a portmanteau as imagined by a spambot, but still, having a poo name show up within seconds of opening registrations, while unsurprising, was a tiny bit depressing. I’m not exactly lamenting the old days of Internet Explorer 6 circa 2001, but the web has certainly changed since then. In most ways, for the better.

But not quite in every way.

Brain cancer and spam

When I finally broke down and got a cell phone last year I was aware of all the stories that suggest the devices could cause brain cancer, impotence, itchy skin and other assorted afflictions. I don’t really care about all that since living on this planet appears to be fatal no matter what.

What does annoys me, though, is it only took nine months to get my first spam message. It came from some company calling out of Quebec, peddling their unwanted wares under the guise of me ‘winning’ travel dollars or somesuch. No, I will not press 1 to claim my ‘prize’. Yeesh.

In the Star Wars universe, all telemarketers would be based out of Mos Eisley.

Spam enough for the world

If only this was actually edible. Food shortages would be over.

Random stats on the spam-pruning here after a little over four years of activity:

Akismet has protected your site from 2,599 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.

WP-SpamFree has blocked 722 spam comments.