I spent the morning going through old comments to this blog, and I was amazed at the proportion that is just spam. In the early days, it seemed like the posts were mostly legit, and then a few years in, spam skyrocketed. Then TypePad made some changes and the frequency of spam posts declined for a while.
Currently, and going back for six months or so, the ratio of spam to genuine comments is more than half. I think some genuine comments may have been lost in the process of filtering out all the junk.
TypePad says they're actively working to filter out as much comment spam as possible, and I believe them. Yet still, the majority of the comments here are spam. At least these days they're thematically accurate; most of the spam I see now is credit-related, and not pharmaceuticals, poker, or pornography.
At any rate, I don't post to the blog as frequently as I used to, so I don't check the back comments more than once per week or so. If you do leave a comment, I'll get to it eventually; if it never shows up, then it may have inadvertently been thrown out with the spam.
Oh, and the email address I post here when I comment is an aol.com address, and that means it's 9 to 1 spam, so private correspondence at that address is very likely to be swept out with the trash. So apologies if I haven't responded to something sent via email. The email address I actually use only gets one unsolicited spam email every six months or so. I aim to keep it that way, so I'll never divulge it here. Just keep trying the .aol address if you're trying to send a comment. I check it every day and try to delete all the junk as it comes in.
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