I am in captivity.  Seriously.

My email program, my email server, my web browser and even my blog software are holding me captive.  They are making every effort to cruelly prevent me from experiencing the full and glorious breadth of the internet experience.

Fortunately, they can’t stop it all.  Despite their tireless attempts to block certain elements, they are not perfect.  A few representatives trickle into my world, and they bring with them tales of the grandeur beyond my computer.  I see only a small slice of that abundant life, but what I do see shows me what I’m missing.

It shows me that the internet is teeming with brand-name medicines for a fraction of the price, penny stocks on the verge of exploding and cheap OEM software for everyone.  Viagra, Valium, Zithromax, Ambien and Xanax are there for the taking; CTCX, FBVG, MISJ and PGCH are just waiting to skyrocket as soon as I buy; Windows XP Professional, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Microsoft Office are available at deep discount.

And Thunderbird, Spam Assassin, Firefox and WordPress — the humorless, joy-squelching gatekeepers of my digital domain — labor to block from my view the news of such endless opportunities?  I must gather the strength to fight this oppression so that I might know everything the internet has to offer me.

Free my internet!

—

The above sarcasm was brought to you by my total inability to understand why, like the door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers before them who blazed an eternally intrusive trail, modern spammers ignore the teraultrasuperwickedlottabytes of evidence for the existence of a widespread distaste for unsolicited advertisements.

I know there’s money in it, but it can’t be only that.  It can’t be just money motivating these dark souls to devote their lives to overcoming the wishes of millions of people by forcing advertisements into every corner of the modern internet experience.  Even in our fallen world, money alone could not be enough to cause a person to descend into the world of emphatically unwanted advertising.

That unwanted advertisement goes beyond junk email.  That’s common enough, with spammers generating random subject lines and body text and making the advertising content graphical to as to dodge spam filters.  The email filters block the spam, the spammers find some new trick, the email filters adjust, and there is nothing new under the sun.  But there’s more than that.

One bothersome spam venue is comment fields on blogs.  Spambots troll the internet looking for blogs — an easy task, to be sure — and upon finding an open comment field, they add an advertisement.  Sometimes they add a generic message that attempts to don the appearance of a legitimate comment; sometimes they add brash lists of links; without fail, though they often are easily stopped, they are bothersome.  (The filter on my blog has caught over 280 spam comments in the last 15 days.)  But there’s even more than that.

When I started this blog, I began keeping an eye on my site statistics.  Among other statistics, I am able to see referral URLs — that is, the page that provided a link to my site.  If a visitor clicked on my link at the College Football Resource blog, CFR would be recorded as a referral.  It can be very informative.

After a few months of blogging, I began to see curious intrusions into my referral list.  Among the sites that made sense, there were sites not just that weren’t likely to link to me, but that I hoped would never, ever link to me.  For the good of every person ever, I won’t provide specific examples; let’s just say there were some red lights involved, and maybe three consecutive appearances of a certain letter between W and Y.  And that was how I learned about referral spam.

Yes, apparently in an effort to provoke ill will among as many internet users as possible, spammers make an effort to advertise in perfectly innocent (and typically not publicly accessible) referral lists.  The advertised sites don’t actually contain a link to the targeted site, but through deep dark magic, spammers shoehorn their unwanted input into the site’s statistics.  Not only is this bothersome, but it is more devious than email or comment spam.  On top of that, it makes little sense to me.

I suppose that’s the common theme in all this: I have trouble understanding the mindset of spammers.  Many people spend their lives wanting to be wanted; spammers spend their lives in an occupation they have to know is clearly unwanted.  If you met a man who said he spends his days helping deliver junk email to millions of inboxes across the planet, would you smile and thank him for his contribution to the world?  Not likely.  And yet there is no shortage of a workforce willing to devote itself to developing a wholly unwanted product.  It seems odd; it seems backwards.

Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe I don’t want to understand it.

(Of course, with all these spam references, this post may either attract spam or be flagged as spam.  That would be rich humor, indeed.)