Hawaiian’s Love their Spam

Crispy Spam is a breakfast Meat

I admit I like Spam. When I let that out to my friends and co workers I get disgusted looks and groans. (The same one I use for Liver and Onions.) Massachusetts folks can be such food snobs! In Hawaii my love of Spam is welcomed. I’m surrounded by other Spam lovers. MacDonald’s even has a “Delicious  Breakfast”. It’s rice, scrambled eggs and Spam! I doubt you’ll see that on a menu in Massachusetts anytime soon. They also have a Spam Wrap you can find in the deli section of your food market. It’s a Spam & Rice roll. Looks like sushi. I skipped the Spam on my breakfast plate. I settled for a boring old Big Breakfast. I’m heading out to drive around the Island and I wasn’t sure if I’d find anyplace for lunch or how long it would take so I wanted to fill up before I left.

Heading North along the Kona Coast

After a satisfying breakfast at MacDonald’s I headed north on the main road along the Kona Coast. All along this road it looks like they are preparing to do construction. The ground appears to be all churned up. There is a lot of construction but don’t be fooled by appearances. Almost all of the churned up appearing land is natural. These fields are all covered in Aa (pronounced ah ah) lava. Aa lava is thick and it  breaks into chunks as it moved down slope form the volcano. When it cools and hardens it looks like churned up dirt. Much of this is from an eruption in 1984. There’s a lava tube on the right side of the road as you travel north.

Lava flow to the sea

 

donkey crossing signDonkey Crossing

Along the way you’ll see Donkey Crossing signs. Donkey Crossings? What’s that about. I had to check it out. Apparently the Big Island had a feral donkey problem. I didn’t remember that but it was bad enough that they installed signs hoping drivers would slow down. The donkeys liked to come out on the roads at night because the pavement was warmer than the fields. It retained the heat from the daytime. Along came an unsuspecting motorist and splat. A Donkey pancake and a busted car. When the signs didn’t help they rounded up the donkeys and shipped them to auction on the mainland. But the signs remain.

lava tube

Spamalot

The Spam issue revisited. I can’t help it. I just want to know how my little blog that is of no major significance, could become the target of so much spam. I think I have it pretty much under control now (watch it blow up on me for saying that) but I just wonder why or maybe how, I became such a target.

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I have another blog, www.dustroadsphotos.com and it gets minimal spam. I don’t know about my  2 other online locations. Spam just doesn’t seem to be an issue at either www.dustyroadsphotos.zenfolio.com or www.dustyroadsphotos.etsy.com. I am truly stumped.

I’ve really tightened up the spam filters here so much so that I’m sure I am catching legitimate postings too so for that I apologize but I was getting hit with over 100 spam comments a day!. According to WordPress,  Akismet has protected this site from 300,369 spam comments already! I wish I had half that much legitimate traffic!

A friend who recently started a new Blog was complaining about the volume of spam his site was generating.

Spam

Everyone knows what email spam is but I really didn’t see how most of these blog spammers were getting anything out of it. Posting a bunch of gibberish as a comment doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me but then I researched  it a bit and good old Akismet, my guardian at the gate for blog spam, posted a short but interesting explanation. You can read it here if you’re interested:   http://akismet.com/how/ It’s called 5 things every blogger should know about spam. In simple easy language it explains that these spammers want to get their hooks into your blog so they can advertise or lead your readers to their own sites where they are selling things.

If you inadvertently approve a spam comment you can open the flood gates! I am sure I have approved such comments. I now make it a policy to mark as spam any comments I get on “old posts”. I’ve found on my blog most legitimate comments are made within a week of the post. If I start getting comments on a post from a year ago red flags go up.

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In any case, I’m glad Akismet is on the job!

SPAM! and I don’t mean the lunch meat

I would love to know how you get targeted by spamers? Lately I have been getting hit by 20-30 spam messages per day! What a mess. It takes forever to sort through them and it isn’t fair to those of you who are following my comments. I am very sorry this is happening.

What did I do to come to their attention? For more than a year I’ve had a nice quiet blogging life!

I contacted WordPress because I know my Spam filters are on and it does catch some of it but they said there’s nothing they can do. I have to enter each IP in order to block it. I am spending more time doing that than I am writing posts.

Has anyone else had this happen to them? How did it happen? Why is it that one day it’s BAU (business as usual) and the next day the comment box is flooded with automated nonsense?

Once it starts it just keeps rolling….5 spam  and I enter the IP in the filter. Next day 10 spam, all new IP’s so I enter them, the next it jumped to 20! It’s like they multiply!

I have entered over 100 IPs in the past week. Any suggestions?