Most of the posts to this blog will consist of my thoughts and reviews of various technology products, but from time to time I like to step onto the soap box and give a nice long rant. This is one of those posts 
I had originally intended to post an article about my favorite iPad apps (that article will still be coming within the next few days) but when I logged into Iowa TechTalk tonight, I noticed several new comments to some of my articles. Seeings as how this is a new blog, I thought “Great! I’m getting some readers!”. Then I check the comments only to find that they are merely Spam with links leading to less than desirable websites. For those of you who frequent less than desirable websites, sorry but I already deleted the comments.
At any rate, it made me think of all of the Spam that I get, and not just via email. Spam has grown to encompass all sorts of outlets including Facebook, Twitter, Text Messages, Instant Messages, and as I learned this evening, blogs. I expect to get spam via email since my address is out there for the world to see on plenty of websites. The real annoyance is receiving unsolicited text messages, IM’s, and blog comments. Unfortunately I know of no way to block text messages that I deem to be Spam, nor do I know of any way to block unsolicited IM’s without setting my IM client to only allow messages from my contact list, but that becomes a problem when it comes to people finding me and trying to add me as an Instant Messenger contact.
As for my blog, I’ll have to look around and see what options are available to moderate the comments to this site a little more without requiring registration on the site or moderator approval. My goal with this blog is to allow for open ended conversations regarding the topics I write about, and I feel that requiring registration would make people far less likely to leave their comments. And I simply don’t have the time to approve every comment that comes into the site, so that isn’t an option either. I suppose there are probably WordPress plugins that allow for CAPTCHA on comments, but I’m new enough to WordPress that I don’t know of any just yet.
So that is where the readers of Iowa TechTalk can come in handy. If you know of a good WordPress plugin that allows for CAPTCHA or other forms of moderation for comments to help weed out the bots that auto-post comments to blogs, please leave a comment and let me know! Just make sure if you do leave a comment that it actually has to do with this post, and isn’t more Spam for me to have to go and delete 
Well, that is all for this techno-rant. I promise that with the next post, we’ll get back to fun things like reviewing my favorite iPad apps!
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