A particular blog-related company, which I’d never heard of before, comment-spammed my blog this morning, as well as the blogs of Joe and a few other people. After deleting the spam comment, I sent an e-mail to the address contained in the spam:
If you were on the up-and-up, you would have sent me an email instead of leaving comment spam on my blog. If you really understood the blog community, you’d know that bloggers hate comment spam. I really don’t appreciate it, and therefore I won’t visit or publicize your site at all.
I received the following reply:
Dear Sir.
High Class Blogs is a not for profit directory. If you’ll notice, we have no advertising on our site. Our directory is run by volunteers who dedicate time from their busy schedules. As it is, you were not contacted by me. But, if you were contacted by one of our reviewers, I can assure you the message was authentic and personal.
Regards.
Maggie Livingston
Approval Department
[Company X]
I responded:
Ms. Livingston, whether the message was “authentic and personal” is not the point. The point is that someone at the company decided to use the comment section of my blog (and the comment section of other people’s blogs) to advertise your website – not to make a comment on a particular post I wrote, but to advertise your company. That is not what the comments section of a blog is for. If the people at your company knew anything about blogs, they would know that bloggers don’t write blogs as avenues for other people to advertise their products, services or business ventures.
Please forward this message to the appropriate department or person.
Thank you.
This evening I received a reply:
You should write a book about the blogging community and then we could all read it and be enlightened.
No need to reply. Good luck with your blog.
Maggie
I responded:
Your reply was sarcastic, and it provided no argument against the fact that comment spam is totally antithetical to the spirit of blogging. I’m not sure how you can work for a blog-related site and not realize this.
I trust you will pass on my previous e-mail regarding your organization’s spam tactics to the appropriate people.
Damn comment spammers.
I got an email from them.
Yes, and wasn’t that e-mail signed by Steve something or other, not Maggie Livingston? It was definitely a man, not a woman.
My blog hasn’t been comment-spammed before since it’s just a week old, but I’ve seen one post in a blog with more than 10 ads in the comments.
And that last reply from ‘Maggie’ deserves a counter-spam on that company’s homepage with their own ads. Nyanyanyanyanya!
Why say “Company X”? Tell us who they are so we can avoid doing business with them.
Amazing. I saw a commments-spam from that company the other day and actually went so far as to visit the URL and after that I still couldn’t tell if it was for real or not.
Now I know it is, but not in a good way.
I can’t believe her final reply to you! Unbelievable!
TC: I’m not posting the company’s name here because I’m not going to give them publicity.
Yeah, I heard from them too. Fuckers.
Well, on the topic of leaving comments that aren’t related to the topic of the entry… I can’t find your email addr and wanted to let you know, in case you don’t already, that SDO’C will be on GMA tomorrow (Monday) morning. Thought you might be interested.
I think I saw that ad in someone else’s comments section. The asshats! And Maggie is right up there as one of the top asshats. E-mailing someone is preferable. Screw ’em!