I incur at least the following spam types:

  • Comment Spam So I disallowed comments. I’m hoping the next stable WordPress upgrade will help to fix it; otherwise, I’d be tempted to add a “I’m a human” checkbutton.
  • Trackback Spam Apparently, there is some hunger for a worthwhile online casino among readers of this blog. I need to install something like the Spam Karma plugin.
  • Referral Spam I rarely read referrer logs now. Mostly get info about incoming links via Technorati.
  • Wiki Spam Programmasaurus, the programmer’s thesaurus wiki, occasionally gets hit by a spambot, I need to set up an email or RSS notifier to watch for changes. Sadly, the robots are much more prolific than humans.
  • Mail Spam No, really. They have spam in email these days. This “mail spam” is just like wiki spam, only it gets in my inbox. Fairly minor thanks to server-side filtering and Thunderbird happily cleans up the remaining few if I’m accessing mail in from the desktop.

In addition, of course, there’s all the spam on other sites - comments on other blogs, junk sites on google. It looks like spammers will continue to find ways to innovate for a long time to come. Perhaps the only hope lies in the tiny minority of consumers who curiously make the activity profitable. If they get burned enough times, maybe they will decide to switch the internet box off. But for the next decade, it’s something to get used to.