Joseph Duemer has taken an innovative approach to the comment spammers: he’s billed them.
The spammer, who sounds as if he’s two sheets shy of a load, fights back by emailing a complaint against Joe to his employer, the President of Clarkson University. (Joe is a professor at Clarkson). Joe, not to be daunted, then calls the comment spammer and speaks to him, directly, on the phone. I’d like to take credit for Joe’s deliberate choice of action on my recent weblog post, but Joe didn’t need the advice – he had already decided to be deliberate in his actions with comment spammers.
I don’t ever want to hear people say that the ‘user’, that mythical beast we techs arrogantly use for any and all unwarranted assumptions and design decisions, is passive and lazy and uninterested in what happens to them in their online environment. Weblogging has shown me that even the most technophobic of people (and Joe is not technophobic) wants to take advantage of the goodies, to understand why bad things happen, and to have control of their environment.
Now does everyone see why I started the For Poets sitse? These poets, they kick butt.
