Pages

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Of this and that and t'other

This is my dear friend Kathy's of Well Placed Words daffodil, thank you Kathy!

This post is a spring mix of various blossoms and one weed.

First up: a couple of FANTASTIC contests if you're looking for an agent:
Sarah with a chance is holding a contest with several great prizes, including lunch with well-known agents! This contest closes Sunday, April 25th.
On the QueryTrackernet.blog, they're having a one line pitch to an agent contest starting April 27th.

And speaking of great places, great places to go to find agents are QueryTracker.net and Agentquery are both excellent resources.

Now the one weed: I doubt if the spammers will get this message, BUT--here goes. At least I'll feel better. I vet every comment on my blog and say yay or nay on it's being posted. I allow anonymous comments because I have some family members and friends (Hi, Cynthia!) who don't have a screen name. However, if you're trying to sell me something that enlarges a part of my anatomy that I don't even possess, or trying to sell me cheap, bizarre drugs from some other country, or marry me to become an American citizen, or post something in gobbledygook, I reject your comment. I don't post it. Nyah, nyah.

There, vent over. I do feel better. Does anybody have a better way of handling this problem?

22 comments:

Angela Ackerman said...

I know--why does this happen? I have found tho that now that i have a word verification, my spam has gone way down.

Helen Ginger said...

Thanks for the contest links. I had to put squiggly word verification on my blog because of spam. Hated to do it, but the spammers give you no choice.

Helen
Straight From Hel

Conda Douglas said...

Ah, I'd forgotten about word verification, Angela--even though I use it all the time on other blogs.

Talli Roland said...

Thanks for the contest links and the beautiful photo!

Conda Douglas said...

Helen--that's why I haven't been using it...but I hate the spam.

Conda Douglas said...

Thanks Talli and welcome to my blog!

Cornish Dreamer said...

I think most of it is just mechanised programmes that send out stuff to everyone. Word verification prevents that :-)

Dave King said...

No, that's as good a way of handling it as any. I'v e only just recently begun to be affected by this issue (in the blog,that is), mostly straight forward advertising. Have you not had offers to dump millions of pounds in your bank account and give you 10%for minding it?

Carol Kilgore said...

Conda, thanks for the links. I use word verification and moderate any comments after three days. So far, so good. Knock on wood.

Enid Wilson said...

Spammer, they are so annoying! But I hope they won't dampen your spring steps.

Really Angelic

Kathy McIntosh said...

Hi, Conda! Glad you liked my daffodil. You take great pictures. There are more in bloom so I may try to catch them tomorrow before the BIG WIND arrives, changing our temperature from 80 to 55.
And yes, the spam is so annoying. I found that word verification seemed to cut visitors, but what are you going to do?

Conda Douglas said...

Claire, yes, I've almost decided to go for word verification--but I've been worried about losing my older family members who are freaked out by word verification.

Jennifer Shirk said...

I use the word verification to get rid of those problems. I removed it yesterday and it didn't last 24 hours before I had to put it back in. Spam makes me grrrrrr.

Conda Douglas said...

Dave--no those fantastic offers come into my regular e-mail!

Conda Douglas said...

Carol--it helped me to vent and I'm figuring out now how to do the word verification.

Conda Douglas said...

Enid--what's dampening my steps is the allergy blooming plants! Ugh. Sniffle, sniffle.

Conda Douglas said...

And Kathy, thank you for the lovely blooms!

Conda Douglas said...

Jennifer--I suppose they get enough hits that they just don't care that the majority of people are savvy and annoyed.

Swubird said...

Conda:

So far I've been lucky. I did get one comment from someone who said they were the main character in the story that I had posted. But of course, they signed on as Anonymous.

Happy trails.

Helen Ginger said...

Conda, I managed to avoid the word verification until the spammers started posting hundreds of comments overnight - not on the current post, but on past posts. I tried deleting them one by one, but couldn't keep ahead of them, and Blogger doesn't let you mass delete. I gave up and put on the verification.

Helen
Straight From Hel

Conda Douglas said...

Swu--your humor gets me every time.

Conda Douglas said...

Helen, that's awful, now let me see how to do the word verification...