The great thing about the internet is that it allows people to disseminate massive amounts of information at amazingly cheap prices.  This is also one of the worst things about the internet...  Because it's so cheap to send out information, there are a lot of people out there spewing out pure garbage on a colossal scale.

Everyone knows about spam email and how annoying it is. But, really, it's not that big of a deal. Be careful who you give your address to, change addresses often, and delete the random junk messages that do make their way in.

Spam's ugly online cousin, spam-bots, can be much more difficult. Of course, not all bots are bad. Without them, we wouldn't have search engines or aggregated news feeds. But, even those useful bots can do a lot of damage. Looking over my access logs and reporting, I find that bots are consistently around 50% of the traffic to all of my sites. That means that 50% of my server load is spent delivering pages to non-humans.

And then, even worse, there are the evil little bots sent out by the same jerks who think sending out bulk spam emails qualifies as a fun hobby. The thing that was good about them in the past was that they were so dumb you could trick 'em real easy. Throw anything in a JavaScript tag and suddenly they don't see it. Or just do the most basic of keyword filtering and knock out virtually all the spam comments on a blog (for some reason, they all seem to talk about viagra, porn, and online degrees a lot). Lately, though, I've seen some alarmingly smart little guys trolling out there.

I had an Ajax script being used for cost-per-click displays of phone numbers and got a huge wave of impressions on it from the same IP in a really short time. I figured it was some prankster, but when I investigated, I found that it was GoogleBot. Of course, this isn't spam, but still it was alarming to see that a spider was out there hitting links that were only available by running a JavaScript function. So, clearly, I'm going to have to do a little re-thinking there and also start worrying about nefarious bots picking up JS capabilities too.

Then, today, I got a notification from WordPress.com that someone had posted a follow-up to one of my comments on another blog. I went back to the post and was very surprised to see my comment reposted again below the original with my name and a link to some spammy site (as my URL). That's impressive. And scary. Now, it's going to take more than a casual glance to figure out which comments are real and which are not. And, it'll probably result in some legitimate comments getting blocked and visa versa.

So, moral of the story is, this isn't the nineties anymore and you can't just assume bots are stupid like they used to be. Watch out.