Rick Ross Tries To Think

The guys behind WordPress had the foresight and energy to create Akismet to help control blog spam, and the blogging world wouldn’t be the same without it. A popular web application like WordPress is a big target for spammers, since they can write bots to pump their spew into it. Akismet helps cut that problem down to size.

I was really pleased to see a cool site called StopForumSpam.com, created by Russ Jackson and helped along by Paul Lush. The idea of StopForumSpam.com is simple – make it easy for people to report spammers on their sites, so others can block them. It’s fast, free, easy to use, and I feel it can help control the damage caused by some of the worst offenders.

Over a half-million known spammers are already listed at StopForumSpam.com, and more are added every day. If you run a forum site you might want to take a look at the mods that are available for phpBB, vBulletin and simpleMachinesForum. There’s also an API available that is very easy to incorporate into your own application.

We liked StopForumSpam.com so much at DZone that we decided to adopt the site and provide hosting and support for it in our data center. Russ and Paul have been carrying the load all by themselves, and it’s a pleasure to be able to help them out in their worthy mission. StopForumSpam.com can’t solve the whole problem, but it can certainly be a piece of the solution. I hope it will be helpful to you!

When I was a teen I read Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” If you haven’t read it, then doing so would be time well spent. The story tells of a gruesome future version of democracy which enforces “all men are created equal” as a literal imperative. If you have above-average talent, the government hobbles you. If you’re smart, they make you wear an earpiece which blasts noise at regular intervals to distract you.

And so we come to Twitter… This is about culture, not about individuals.

The steady stream of tweets is at least as effective as the government enforced distractions in Bergeron’s society. Twitter isn’t a way to keep everyone connected, and these 140-character blasts aren’t the virtual synapses of a new neural network that spans all of society. Nothing could be further from reality. It turns out we don’t need Vonnegut’s “Handicapper General” to ensure that we’re adequately distracted. We’re more than happy to do it to ourselves voluntarily – we’re even eager!

It must be true that the internet is democratizing the world, but I’m not altogether sure I’m going to love the world we get as a result. It’s hard enough to focus without Twitter, and I don’t even have an earpiece blasting at me every 15 seconds! If you ask me, Twitter is more than just distracting: it will make/keep us “equal” in a Harrison Bergeron kind of way.