I just noticed that the Askimet spam filter plugin for WordPress provides PHP code to display its spam-comments-blocked counter on your blog. I wonder: could one use the number of spam comments received as a measure of a blog’s popularity? Presumably spam bots target sites that are more heavily linked by other sites, making them rough approximations of Google’s PageRank.

Just imagine it: Spam is the new hits. “My blog gets more spam than your blog.” “I need to add more porn links to my site to attract more spam.” “We need to focus on our spam-engine-optimization strategy.” “This blog brought to you by Cia|is.”

For the record, Askimet has caught 1,958 spam comments in the few months since I installed it, or about 30 times the number of legitimate comments I have received since I started writing the blog.

To clarify for some respondants to Voted Off the Planet: As far as I know, the decision to remove my blog from Planet Lisp was not made collectively by readers but solely by the site’s maintainer. As is apparent from comments on the announcement, some people approved of the decision and some did not, but those comments came after it had already been done. The emailed responses I’ve gotten have been uniformly positive — thank you to those people, and to anyone who is still reading.

I was never actually notified either when my blog was added or when it was dropped. I think that’s revealing: I was not being invited into the community, I was being tested. According to one person’s standards, I failed. That in itself does not surprise me. I was not ready for such a large and demanding audience. I only started this blog a few months ago, and I am definitely still feeling my way towards a writing style.

What did surprise me was the viciousness of the criticism, some of it from people who were clearly only skimming my posts anyway. E.g., I was “hassling” Planet Lisp by announcing “UFFI bindings to a C library.” Well, 1) It was CFFI, not UFFI; 2) only half of it is bindings, the rest re-implements bits of the Perl API in Lisp and translates data between the two; and 3) I said it was just for fun.

Or was the idea of embedding Perl code in Common Lisp just too heretical? ;)

But the lesson I can take from all this is that I still have a long way to go. So bear with me, gentle readers, as this page (hopefully) evolves into an interesting and enjoyable discussion.