Trends reverse themselves (an amusing way of saying our predictions were wrong)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/02/08 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/02/08/7541167.aspx


Trends are not rules. Hell, they aren't even guidelines.

Trends really are really little more than our attempt to make sense out of what is happening and perhaps to try to figure out what will be happening if our analysis of trend(s) was valid....

Anyway, thinking back to Hello! I am bored this afternoon. I am a nice Blog that would like to blog with you....  and YASSU (Yet another SIAO spam update) the spam was definitely on the way down, at an all time low, in fact.

However, the trend did not last, and the current spam as of midnight is actually sitting at 4793, which is an all time high in the time that I have been looking at the amount of spam caught by the filters within the window of the last seven days.

Yes, that is right.

4,793

That is a lot of spam caught in the trap -- with none making it into the blog!

And it is currently trending upward still -- with the incoming each day greater than the outgoing from seven days prior.

In that huge list, I have almost certainly (occasionally) lost genuine comments caught as false positives, and since I am not reviewing them all, those comments are lost for good. So if a comment of yours never made it live, then I am sorry about that....

Now my experiment of turning on trackbacks/pingbacks just before I post and then immediately turning them off again has successfully removed the threat of all trackback/pingback spam, at the cost of losing all external referrals to posts that I do.

I am still not sure how I feel about that, because even though I can look at referral logs, I usually don't.

I also find my regular reading of blogs has suffered as of late. I get to it eventually, but there is now a pause of between a week and a month before I see posts sometimes.

So the net effect today is that I now feel much more isolated from the blogosphere, which may or may not be such a bad thing -- I am still deciding. It certainly leaves me more time to live my life (the side effect of that is that I probably blog less about it, which is probably not a bad thing).

Maybe it is time to let some of the spam back in, to get connected again!

And then to get back into posting in the two series that I started while I was in India on text based TIPs and reversing sort keys that people have been holding their breaths waiting for!

 

This spam weather report brought to you by(U+2614, aka UMBRELLA WITH RAIN DROPS)


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