Here’s a hard question. It has a little setup.
I get a lot of spam on CSS-Tricks. I employ various evolving technologies to help fight it. One of them, Akismet, has blocked almost 1.5 million spam comments from the site. Despite doing a pretty good job, a lot of spam slips through. Maybe a few dozen a day. I have to clean up of that by hand, which I’m glad to do because it’s part of having a community.
I’ve cleaned up so many spam comments over the years that I have a brain/eye/muscle memory for it. I feel like I can practically smell a spam comment.
Here’s a very obvious example:
I can look at that URL and know it’s spam. But sadly, you know what I notice first? The Arabic writing. I’d say there is a near 100% chance that if a comment has Arabic writing, on my site, it’s spam.
I hate spam. I get pretty intense feelings about it. And now I’ve started to associate Arabic writing with something I hate.
I know that’s not fair. I know that Arabic writing isn’t to blame for this. I should be such a controlled, evolved, intelligent person that this doesn’t affect me in any way. But I don’t know if any of us are really that strong. If a rabbit comes and shits in your bed every day, you’re gonna start to hate rabbits even if you know that’s not fair.
But now that I’ve noticed this, I need to take steps to ensure I don’t build up misplaced associative hate just because of how my brain is wired up.
How do I do that?
I might buy a painting or a print that I find beautiful that has Arabic writing on it and hang it somewhere I see every day. I might try and remove the author name field from the comment notification fields I get, so I can focus on the more important URL field and comment content. But I’d also love to hear if you’ve faced similar challenges and how you dealt with them.
Chris… A) You think too much; B) Of 6 email addresses, the only spam I ever receive is through the 5 Bluehost/srv/htdocs/HTML addresses and almost never through the 1 most active gmail address (where over 60% is from England); C) Interesting why your mind goes to self-blame for hating non-requested sh!t – rabbit or otherwise; D) Better than letting your mind get away with self-destructive behavior, focus it on a full-force vendetta against what you really hate (sh!t right?). Sound’s like a bigger money-maker than CodePen; E) If you’ve really got the excess free time to worry about this – go back to doing more videos – your roots – what started your career; and F) You think too much.
I don’t think you’re necessarily associating (all) arabic writing with something bad, but rather specifically (all) arabic writing online and on your sites.
Unless you also get those hateful feelings when you watch CNN and you see a report on something and it has some arabic writing? I doubt you start yelling “DAMN YOU, SPAM!” inside your head when that happens.
I don’t think it’s necessary to worry about this. Us Internet people have the exact same reaction when we see the .ru extension, don’t we? Over the years/decades it earned its bad reputation, I’d say.
Personally, I don’t think we need to be overly politically correct about this type of thin. In your (online) world, arabic writing is likely, often, probably, 99% sure a spam message. So it’s fair that a comment/email with arabic writing triggers that reaction in you.
I feel that caring for people is more important than solving problems. It is more efficient to care in the long run, even if in the short run it seems that it is not. Chris, I feel and think that it is great that you are taking this time to reflect on this type of thing. You seem to do a great job at keeping yourself in check. I do agree that often people can be overlyconcerned about being politically correct, but I disagree that this is one of those times. I especially appreciate that your concern seems to be not so much with what is most efficient or something, but that you could be putting injury or insult (even if it seems small) to an individual, even if that individual is a part of a greater whole that for the most part may not seem to care about you and your feelings and business. I validate and endorse your concern here, and your apparent approach to making things better.
Where I work at them moment we have a lot of news stories that go through our blog and a lot of the terrible stuff has to do with Arabic things simply because people flock to it.
I found myself starting to feel like I disliked anything related to the Middle East but not for any good reason because I know there is crazy violence everywhere. Most of it doesn’t make it to the news.
My favorite remedy for this is browsing GitHub and seeing the npm packages people have written from all over the world that remind of how amazing people are. Just have to readjust my focus sometimes.
Bad behavior plugin for wordpress kills most spam on the sites i build :) I use it when Akismet is not effective enough.
Actually that text is Persian not Arabic. The IP points to Iran, as does the email’s domain (.ir).