The title sounds like a communicable disease, doesn’t it? Anyhoo…
Contacting me is changing around here.
Just an FYI in case you have thought about talking to me about, well… anything really… one-on-one.
I’ve decided against continuing to make the contact form available on my “about” page. For every single legit attempt to communicate with me, I get about fifty to a hundred spam contacts. Over the years, I’ve also had some very odd communications from folks as well.
The contact form is largely more of a honeypot for bad actors who want to sell me everything from purchased popularity (i.e., web traffic) to SEO (i.e., again, web traffic) to Romanian sexpot housewives. Some even want to give me free money or crypto! Imagine that!
Get yer money for nothing and yer chicks for free!
I’ve decided that I am tired of reviewing the contact form spam filter on a regular basis for false positives. I’ve never had a false positive on the forms. The large volumes of spam are just not worth it to have a contact form.
Instead…
Please comment instead on this or any standard post indicating that you would like me to contact you by the email address associated with your comment and explicitly state your reasons for wanted me to contact you in the comment. I will reach out to you privately if your reasons seem legit and I am interested in what has been proposed.
I expect most of you reading this will have already reached out to me for direct communications and will be unimpacted. This is more for those who have thought about filling out the contact form but haven’t gotten around to actually doing so.
13 responses to “Contact Spam”
For every piece of information spam we get, companies should have to send us real Spam. 🤣
I know, right? At least we could fry some up with eggs and have a hearty breakfast.
🎉 Yes!
Totally understand!
Unlucky for you, you’ve reached out and not withdrawn your permission for me to terrorize you with my bland pablum of discussion via email. 🤣
🤣 Always up for a good tale!
🤣
I get Contact Form emails with nothing in them. It’s not spam, it’s not legit, just a blank email. I guess it’s better than spam but it’s still like “is this a psychic test? Am I supposed to mind read the message?” 😄
It’s invisible ink! 🤣
I’ve had a few of those as well. I suspect someone or a bot is attempting to run script that gets stripped out when it get dumped off to spam.
Totally off topic, but a good place, I think, to raise this. I still am not informed by email when you reply to one of my comments. When I get the chance, I’ll pull up the post I’ve commented on to see if you’ve responded, and 99.9% of the time you have, but I am not made aware. Other blogs I follow email responses to me. I’ve pulled up my settings for your blog and if I click “email comments” I get everyone’s comments, which is not helpful. I just would like to see your replies (unless you’re ghosting me 😉 )
👻
I’ll look into it, but it might be an issue beyond my ability to fix. There are demonstrable bugs that plague the non-WP hosted variant of Jetpack. It improves, then another bug shows up.
I have a feeling that it might be an error in the database, which is scary zone for mucking about in. But I’ll hunt around to see what might be causing the issue only for you (that I know of). It might be a spell before I can do that though.
I got your “like” but not your response. Whenever you have a chance…it’s not high priority. Thank you!
I’ll see what I can do 💙