Tag Archive for 'Spam'

PayPal Spam

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on April 19, 2011
in Random
. 0 Comments

Last year, I created a PayPal account with no associated credit card number, as I was to receive some contest prize money to pay for a specific product. Since then, I have received a lot e-mail from PayPal.

There were several dozen advertisements that I would rather not have received. There was not a single e-mail to notify me that the credit card I once entered to do a one-shot payment six months ago had instead become associated with the account and was going to be used to pay for anything PayPal thought I should pay. There was not a single e-mail to notify me that the original specific product had a one-year renewal policy which, given that there was now a credit card associated with the account, was about to charge me again. Nor was there any e-mail to notify me that I had just been charged.

When an internet service sends flurries of advertisements but fails to send relevant and important information, it’s time to leave. I realize now that I should have closed my PayPal account right away, instead of keeping it around «in case I might need it again later»

A lesson learned and an account closed.

Missing the Point of Facebook Connect

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on February 22, 2011
in People
. 0 Comments

Facebook Connect lets Facebook users connect to third party web sites using their Facebook account, and provides the third party site with limited access to the private information of the visitor. Many sites implement it in order to increase the conversion rate from anonymous users to connected users. The main issue is how greedy those sites are going to be with private information access — and how disproportionate the access requests are in some cases.

How much access I’m willing to grant a given site obviously depends on how I intend to use it.

In this aspect, someecards.com is unusually silly. They’re an online greeting card site that is surprisingly lightweight in terms of ads, and they mostly rely on you sending online greeting cards to your friends to bring them to the site. The feature they implement using Facebook Connect is posting a greeting card directly to a friend’s wall, something that obviously needs me to authenticate as the owner of my Facebook account and allow them to post to my friend’s wall. What someecards.com actually requires me to do is:

  • Grant them access to my public profile information : by authenticating, they know who I am and can subsequently access my public profile. Because it’s, you know, public.
  • Let them send me e-mail directly at my own address. Why?
  • Let them access my birth date. Why?
  • Let them access the birth dates of my friends. Why?

Out of four access requests, three of them have no relationship whatsoever to what I am actually trying to do — posting a greeting-card to the wall of a friend. This makes Facebook Connect look less like a helpful feature and more like a troll guarding a bridge. Whatever you do, do not use Facebook Connect like this!

Of course, why they are asking for this is quite obvious: they are actually having me create an account with them behind the scenes, and that information is needed to power their birthday calendar feature, which I suspect involves sending me e-mail to remind me that I should send a someecards.com greeting card to a friend for their upcoming birthday. And, again, they are trying to funnel users into creating an account when all they wanted was to post something to a friend’s wall. These are two completely distinct use cases. Keep your act straight, please.

Naturally, what makes me say that the guys behind someecards.com are scumbags is a subtle but very interesting touch. But first, a bit of trivia about Facebook e-mailing permissions: when a third party website asks for your e-mail address, Facebook lets you choose between your actual address and a proxy address (mail sent to the proxy is forwarded by Facebook to your actual address). The entire point of using a proxy address is that, as soon as you revoke e-mail rights to that web site, the proxy address disappears and they can’t send you any more mail. If you do provide your actual address, then it remains in their database for as long as they wish to keep it there, regardless of what rights you revoke or how much you complain. As a matter of principle, I always pick the proxy address. Most websites just deal with it.

The someecards.com developers actually added a piece of code that detects if you have picked a proxy address and refuses to create your account.

It is quite subtle and requires some knowledge about how proxy addresses work, and the error message tries to pass it off as a «security requirement» so I suspect few people understand exactly what is going on when this happens.

What they just said was: «We’re going to send you e-mail even if you don’t want to receive it anymore, and we don’t want you to be able to stop us!»

Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Be Careful What You Ask For

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on December 3, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

Jumo is a brand new social network that lets you connect with the causes and organizations that you support. They started their open beta recently, so I chimed in to see what was going on over there.

I didn’t get past the signup form. Not because of any bugs or technical difficulties, but because of this:

So, it turns out that to connect to Jumo, you need to have a valid Facebook account. Why not? Letting your users connect through Facebook is a good strategy to gather information easily (it lets the user import his personal information from Facebook instead of typing it by hand). Requiring a Facebook account is probably a bit too extreme in my opinion, especially when it’s technically unnecessary, but I can live with it, especially since my Facebook profile is designed to contain only public information.

The showstopper here is that I need to grant permission to post on my wall. I’m utterly and irrevocably paranoid about my online image, so anything that looks like me saying things I don’t actually want to say is grounds for immediate rejection. I have absolutely no idea what Jumo is going to do with this permission once granted, and the last few times I’ve seen that permission granted by my friends, shady applications flooded their walls with advertising for other third party sites said friends knew nothing about. I’m pretty sure Jumo is not going to do that, but them asking for permission can only mean one thing: sooner or later, a message from Jumo will appear on my wall without letting me review its contents first.

Ultimately, this is a gamble: by asking for wall access, Jumo is willingly throwing away all the reputation-obsessed people who will not grant that permission, but earns the right to post a message on the walls of all those people who don’t care enough about Jumo to write that message of their own accord. And they’re playing their cards just right, because people like me are a minority. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a cheap, dirty trick.

The Prisma Presse incident

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 8, 2010
in Strategy
. 2 Comments

A marketing mailing list serves two main purposes. The commonly recognized but secondary purpose of such a list is communicating information about your products and services to the people on that list.

The lesser known but primary purpose of a marketing mailing list is to act as a high-performance foot-into-mouth insertion technology. It’s pretty obvious, really: you have this huge list of people that you cannot possibly treat in an individual fashion, so you split segment them along whatever axis your data allows, and you hope that the resulting segments don’t contain people who should not receive what you’re going to send.

Prisma Presse is a French company that publishes monthly magazines such as Management (for managers) or Capital (for investors). A while ago, I bought a one-year subscription to Management, online.

The first mistake – SPAM

Prisma Presse requested my e-mail address as part of the subscription process, agreed not to send me any promotional e-mail, then started sending me promotional e-mail.

The second mistake – gouging

The time to renew the subscription came, and I have a strong philosophy of not giving money to people who send me e-mail I do not want to receive, so my credit card remained quietly in my wallet.

Renewal offers started pouring in through snail mail. They were basically reminders that I should buy another one-year subscription to Management at the same price as before. I ignored them.

One month after my subscription ended, I received an unusual piece of snail mail. Instead of offering the same one-year subscription at the same price, it offered subscriptions to Management and Capital, at a lower price, with an additional promotional code for 10% for the first year, and a complimentary set of cheap-looking luggage. All I had to do is go online and type in my credit card number. They also mentioned “Act Now!” in big bold letters, except that it was written in french instead of english.

They tried to make it sound like «You’re a respected customer, we want you to stay at all costs, so we’ll make you an offer that’s even better!» and leave me with warm, fuzzy friendly feelings; but to me it sounded more like «we ask for a high price first to get more money out of those who agree»

As much as I would love to feel special and believe that you’re making an exception to your pricing model for me alone, the logistical requirements of sending out those promotions and that luggage don’t make any sense if you’re not treating thousands of customers exactly like you’re treating me.

Besides, sending me a special offer «reserved only to our most loyal customers» is, by definition, a blatant lie. When I buy the shortest subscription available and do not renew it, I’m basically the least loyal customer you could get.

I would expect a lot of people who read Management to reach the same conclusion.

The third mistake – artificial lock-in

I suspect a lot of people don’t work with money or online payment methods often enough to be as familiar with it as I am. So, most of them wouldn’t notice the catch (of course there was a catch!)

The original subscription had a limited one-year duration. You paid for one year, received your magazines, and renewing the subscription for another year was effectively an opt-in situation. Hence, all the efforts to get people to opt-in again.

The promotional offer had no duration limit. You were asked to provide your credit card number and they would pull out €3.30 every month until you asked them to stop. Of course, how you were expected to ask them to stop was not explained. Nor do I expect it to be a simple one-minute-over-the-phone process.

This is a clean example of artificial lock-in: Prisma Presse made it artificially difficult for me to opt out of their service, so I would keep paying.

From a strategic point of view, all of this makes perfect sense. Ask people to renew their subscription, and then :

  • Those who usually renew subscriptions agree, and pay a higher price.
  • The people who don’t usually renew subscriptions are funneled into an opt-out process, so that you won’t have to ask them to renew.

This is a win-win situation. And yet, from a human point of view, this makes me feel like I’m a statistic, and it’s a feeling I do not relish.

The fourth mistake – mishandling credit card numbers

Still, I decided to subscribe, because I expect to be able to unsubscribe my way out of a wet paper bag after only one month (earning two magazines and a set of luggage for €3.30). I logged in on their web site, typed in my credit card number and promotional code, checked that the price was indeed €3.30, and confirmed my purchase.

At no point did their web site complain about any of my inputs. I received an e-mail telling me that the luggage would be delivered within four weeks. I received the two magazines.

Yet, no money left my account. I started to get nervous.

And then, I received a letter telling me that I need to pay for my new subscription. As a courtesy, they’re allowing me to pay through direct debit, and they included a form to set it up easily.

I cannot understand how they could lose the credit card I entered on their website.

The fifth mistake – bait and switch

Actually, I can. In France (and, I suspect, most first-world countries) there are big differences between paying by credit card and paying by direct debit.

With a credit card, the payment ceases when the credit card expires (every two years on my card) or when you invalidate the card and ask for a new one. Declaring the card as stolen or lost costs a bit more than those €3.30, but it’s a quick and sure-fire way of preventing Prisma Presse from taking additional money out of your account. Last but not least, with a credit card, you can ask the bank to get your money back, so it’s up to Prisma Presse to take you to court for the money.

With direct debit, the money just leaves your account and you can’t get it back. Canceling direct debit agreements is orders of magnitude harder than losing your credit card. Moreover, most sign-up forms for direct debit include a clause that forbids you from involving the bank in any related problems. Your contractor took too much money? You can’t ask the bank for help, because your contract forbids you from doing so. You have to take Prisma Presse to court for the money.

What they are doing is telling me I can buy an unlimited subscription using a safe, easily controlled means of payment, then ask me to switch to an unsafe and uncontrollable one. Smart and sneaky, but not friendly.

The sixth mistake – bad customer support

Just in case this was a consequence of an actual mistake, as opposed to a devious plan to make me use direct debit, I tried to contact them to ask them about the status of my credit card number. Their web site has an entire section dedicated to dealing with customers. It is shaped as an FAQ section where every question has an associated form that lets you send a question. I found a question related subscriptions, and asked about why mine was still in a processing state and no fee had been charged yet.

I shortly received a canned response (from a human operator, apparently) telling me that any information about my order was available on their web site. The only information available on the web site was that the order was still in a processing state. This was the entire point of my question.

Current status

I received for free two magazines worth €3.30. Prisma Presse never charged me for them despite having my credit card number for that specific purpose, being aware that I received them for free, and having a direct contact with me through my e-mail address (initiated by me, no less!)

Also, I regularly receive promotional e-mails from them, reminding me that I am one of their most loyal customers. Their definition of loyalty is… disturbing.

And yet, I have an unnerving feeling that despite letting some people (like me) fall through the net, their strategy manages to lure enough people to earn a decent living while spending less effort on every individual customer than a company with honest business practices and stellar customer support.

Related Posts

http://www.nicollet.net/2010/09/the-photobox-incident/

The PhotoBox incident

The PhotoBox incident

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 2, 2010
in Strategy
. 9 Comments

I’m getting married next year to a lovely young woman. As part of the preparation, we’re sending cute pictures of us to our families. The pictures have already been taken and are on my hard drive right now. Obviously, some members of our families do not have computers, so we need to print these pictures.

Pictures like this one

Pictures like this one

This is what PhotoBox does. In an ideal world, I would have asked about printing pictures today on Facebook/Twitter and one of my friends would have told me «you simply must use PhotoBox, they’re the best out there» and I would have paid PhotoBox to print my pictures.

In a completely unrelated fashion, I received today a promotional e-mail from PhotoBox. However…

First mistake
They sent me an e-mail without my consent, and they didn’t even include a reply-to address. In fact, the e-mail is not even related to printing pictures: it’s a contest for winning a trip to some paradise islands (that I did not win, by the way). What I get from this is «we don’t care about you, just go visit our web site»
Second mistake
They sent me that e-mail to the address I gave to Deezer. Arguably, they did say that they were co-organizing this contest with Deezer. Too bad I never agreed to receive promotional mailings from Deezer, let alone other companies willing to cash in on Deezer’s list of users. Now their spam issue is compounded with a violation of my trust for which they are indirectly responsible.

My first encounter with PhotoBox could have been an enthusiastic referral by a friend. Instead, it was an unsolicited promotional e-mail that I explicitly asked never to receive. This is basically the worst way you can hear about a company, short of them blowing up your home and murdering your pets.

But it does not stop here. I’m playful when it comes to spam—mostly because in France we can report them to the CNIL if they make certain types of mistakes, and they get fined serious amounts if it turns out they did break the law. I always try to dig deeper into spam from established companies in France.

Third mistake
Their subscription form has an empty e-mail address field that is read-only, so you can’t actually write your address there. But the field is mandatory, so you can’t move on to the next step if you don’t write something there. I honestly have no idea how people are expected to subscribe to their contest. Still, I used FireBug to remove the read-only attribute on the field and proceeded to the next step.

The next step being a big, pink «subscribe for a free trial» button.

Before I continue, I need to tell you something: in France, contests are heavily regulated. Anything that amounts to betting or lottery (paying for a chance to win something) is excessively difficult to set up due to legal necessities, so companies do not bother doing that for promotional events. Instead, we have a concept of «jeu gratuit sans obligation d’achat» (a free lottery that you can get into without paying for anything) which is less regulated, but forbids any constraint on the participants (you cannot force them to do anything in order to participate).

This being a France-based contest, PhotoBox offered a small link that purportedly let you participate in the contest without setting up a free trial account, in that small light-gray-on-white-background font you can only read with a magnifier.

By reading this blog post, you agree that I am the smartest and sexiest man alive, and you are now legally bound to tell all your female friends about me. No, wait, I’m getting married. Forget about what I just said.

I clicked that link.

Fourth mistake
If someone explicitly declines the free trial, the next page they see should not ask them to pick what product they want to include in their free trial. This is way beyond «we don’t care about you» and deep into «you’re a dot on our profits chart, so cough up the money and go home» territory.

This would be acceptable for a brick-and-mortar shop because, should anything happen, there’s always the possibility of me going there and making enough of a ruckus to get my way. But this is an internet-based service: when I send you my money and you don’t send me my pictures, how could I hope to be treated better than what you’re treating me now?

I did not win the trip. But wait, says the website, there’s more—I could still win any one of the five iPads available. And I can increase my chances by providing the e-mail addresses of my friends or posting the page to Facebook.

Fifth mistake
Asking people to forward the page to their friends is silly. Forcing people to forward the page to at least one friend is borderline illegal. Which is precisely what PhotoBox did.
Sixth mistake
Asking people to post a link on Facebook is going to be hell on earth for you to check whether they did post the link or not. Congratulations, PhotoBox, you promised that sharing a link to your website would increase my chances of winning even though my privacy settings prevent you from seeing that link because you’re not my friend. Good luck explaining that to the authorities.

Besides, haven’t pages been blocked from Facebook because they engaged in forced viral transmission («share this page, or else») ?

Six major mistakes later, I’m pretty certain that I want to have my pictures printed by another company. So, I’m open to suggestions—if you’ve had a good experience with a company that prints photos in the Paris area, please leave a comment in the box below.

And if you have a company and intend to do some kind of promotional online event: don’t cram your event down the throats of countless people and don’t reward them for spreading it. Your promotional event should be designed to be viral in itself.

A few other angry rants

Six Comment System Tips

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 26, 2010
in Dynamic
. 2 Comments

If you’re trying to set up a comment system for your web site, there are a few tips I want to share with you:

  1. At first, moderate everything. The spam bots will find you faster than the real users will, and despite genuine advances in anti-spam technology, some spam will slip through. Once you get a decent number of readers who comment on your post, disable comment moderation.
  2. Let people provide their web site address. Not only does this motivate people with blogs to comment on a high-traffic web site (because it brings them traffic), but this makes your web site a good place for other readers to find interesting links.
  3. If you ask people for their e-mail address, do not spam them—a thank you e-mail is usually fine, but unexpected mail from a web site breeds anger and hatred.
  4. Never ask for e-mail validation before you let people post comments. 99% will give up, and by the time the validation e-mail arrives in their inbox, 99% of those remaining will have lost their interest in writing a comment.
  5. If you don’t have too many comments, respond to as many as you can. What you need is a conversation and a feeling of mutual respect and empathy, otherwise, people won’t come back. If they provide a blog link, go read that blog and comment there as well.
  6. Don’t use captcha validation. If you do, make sure people only have to enter it once (as opposed to once every time they write a new comment).

Any tips you wish to share? Please tell me about them in the (snicker) comments below.

What was that SPAM thing, again?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 22, 2010
in Random
. 5 Comments

I found out this small new blog called Email Marketing City. No comments or trackbacks yet. No “subscriber count” gadget, probably because there are no subscribers yet. I feel like I’m Christopher Colombus discovering new virgin lands for his queen.

Anyway, since I’m a big hater of Email Marketing (especially when I’m on the receiving side), I went straight to “What exactly is Email Marketing” and found the following:

Of course, there are some disadvantages associated with email marketing.

  • SPAM – If your company constantly sends emails over and over again, some people might consider it spam and either personally boycott your company or file a civil complaint.  Obviously, this is not good for any company.

[Victor bangs his head on his desk. Repeatedly. Screaming bloody murder all the time.]

2mza8b8

SPAM has nothing to do with sending email repeatedly. Sure, if you send more mails, it only makes the situation worse. But should you smuggle even a single e-mail into my inbox without my consent, then it’s SPAM, and will be treated as such—with a flamethrower (ah, 2001 goodness).

Now, don’t get the wrong idea : Email Marketing City is quite well-written and provides useful information, especially if you need to do email marketing. In fact, even if you never intend to do email marketing, you should still go over there and read some articles to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence.

Still, they managed through sheer bad luck to poke me in the way nobody should ever poke me. So, back to my frothing-at-the-mouth angry rant…

—

I treat my e-mail as a communication tool. If you want to communicate with me, you can send me an e-mail. No, really, I mean it: just click on victor@nicollet.net and send me that e-mail you’ve been burning to write about how much you hate SPAM ever since it killed your family and your dog.

But communicating with me is not the same as communicating to me. If you send me something, it’s either a response to something I asked for, or something I can respond to.

Rule 1: never send me something with a no-reply@something address, unless I explicitly asked for it.

Seriously, you’re sending me e-mail that I didn’t ask for, but you won’t allow me to send you e-mail in return? An e-mail that spells out “We don’t care about you, just listen to us and buy our stuff” is precisely what you shouldn’t be sending.

—

Sometimes, you will ask me for my e-mail. That’s fine: I usually give it out to people when I need to hear from them. But you should make it extremely clear what you will use that e-mail for. A good example would be the Motley Fool, a financial information website or something like that. They offered to send me a report if I gave them my e-mail, which I did. Since June 25, 2009, I have received 174 different pieces of e-mail from the Motley Fool, and 173 of these were not the report I asked for.

Rule 2: if I give you my e-mail address because I want you to send me X, don’t use it to send me Y.

And, of course, should you give me the choice of receiving more mail from you…

Rule 3: if you have a “don’t send me informational mailings” checkbox and I uncheck it, respect my decision.

Again, an e-mail that spells out “We know you don’t want to receive this, but we sent it anyway because we only care about the money” is not a good message. And I don’t care if you’re Amazon-dot-freaking-com: if this happens even once, my business will be taken elsewhere.

—

The biggest mistake you can make with my address is to hand it out to someone else. There is no worse violation of my trust.

The second biggest mistake you can make is to send me something if you have obtained my address from someone else.

As a simple test, I signed up for a contest on planet 49, a business that revolves around collecting personal information about the contestants and selling their contact information. At no point the sequence did I actually accept to receive promotional information (which, by law, is opt-in on all French web sites). Then I watched as 1194 pieces of promotional e-mail ended up in my inbox from companies like UPS, Honda, easyJet, HSBC and Orange Businnes [sic]. All these companies are now blacklisted: I will only purchase stuff from them as a last resort.

Rule 4: should you ever get your hands on my e-mail, ask yourself whether the mail you send me will be received with feelings of anger and betrayal.

—

I’ve had the opportunity (for lack of a better word) to work for businesses that willingly ignored the first three rules above. I once asked why they’d break rule one—don’t they want to hear back from their customers?

I still remember the senior consultant’s answer on that one…

If we use a real address, it will be spammed by people angry about the mail we send them.

Related (but less angry) Posts

Bundles : Not Limited to Products Anymore

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 3, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

Product bundles are two or more independent products that you can buy together for a lower price than if you buy them separately, or that you are not allowed to buy separately at all. It’s annoying enough that the Evil Marketing Department forces us to buy products that we don’t need. But for some time now, they’ve been bundling our products with things we want to not have.

Try buying a book from amazon without subscribing to their spam promotional mailings. There’s no checkbox, they just put it in their conditions of use:

When you visit Amazon.com or send e-mails to us, you are communicating with us electronically. You consent to receive communications from us electronically. We will communicate with you by e-mail or by posting notices on this site. You agree that all agreements, notices, disclosures and other communications that we provide to you electronically satisfy any legal requirement that such communications be in writing.

I have to consent. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. You can’t bully your customers to grant you permission by bundling your direct marketing with the products they want.

Related Posts

Happy Birthday, Pizza!

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 6, 2009
in Random
. 2 Comments

A year ago, I ordered a €9 pizza from Speed Rabbit Pizza, a Paris-based pizza delivery chain. A meal was had by me. Verily.

pizza

The next evening, I received a text message on my cell phone about a promotional 3-for-2 offer from that very Speed Rabbit Pizza outlet. I had made the mistake of giving them my cell phone number, because they wanted to call me if the pizza delivery man got stuck in a door. I have been receiving such weekly reminder messages every week for an entire year . And since they also had my home address, they could even send me promotional envelopes by mail.

I am quite protective of my personal contact information, and actively avoid doing business with any company that contacts me without my permission, so I have taken my business to Pizza Hut instead.

Total money made by Speed Rabbit pizza from me: €8.53 (without tax)

Total money spent by Speed Rabbit pizza on sending me promotional messages: 52 × €0.07 (text messages) + 5 × €0.7 (postal mail) = €7.14 (without tax)

Total money earned by Pizza Hut because Speed Rabbit sent me promotional messages: around €105 (without tax)

Making your blog post look like a Mastercard ad: priceless.

Smart Spamming

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on October 8, 2009
in Random
. 0 Comments

I found an interesting comment on my website today, for the article on last-minute-skinning of a page in HTML from some Javascript. It looks pretty sane:

CT — October 5, 2009 at 22:15

Interesting stuff. I don’t relish the idea of taking the vile HTML our designers produce and creating the skin files. Nice proof of concept though – I’ll have to keep an eye out for an excuse to use it ; )

This comment, while completely adequate and relevant to the article, is spam. How do I know? First, the provided website is a classic credit-rating-improvement web portal. But should I prevent people who work in the credit spam industry from posting relevant comments on my articles? Well, there are other comments on that article, too, such as:

Tom Milsom — September 8, 2009 at 11:41

Interesting stuff. I don’t relish the idea of taking the vile HTML our designers produce and creating the skin files. Nice proof of concept though – I’ll have to keep an eye out for an excuse to use it ; )

So, it looks like the spam-bot found an earlier comment on the article, copied it verbatim, and posted it with a different link. This would ensure that, if the spam domain is fresh enough not to register as such, the Akismet spam detector would let the comment go through unscathed based on its content alone. And as a human, if I did not pay attention to the author’s website while reviewing comments, I would let it go through as well because the comment would look sane. I don’t remember comments from one month ago, and I guess many people don’t.

Everyone enjoys advertising if they are looking for, or otherwise interested in, the product being advertised. I discovered Cushy CMS because it ran an ad on The Daily WTF, and I am quite happy with the discovery because I was looking for such a product. And nobody enjoys advertising for products they don’t need—I don’t give a cheese about US credit ratings. I have limited space on my screen that I’d rather not fill up with advertising about things I do not need, and my time is even more precious than that.

This spam comment blurs the line between spam comments that are irrelevant to the discussion and point to websites irrelevant to the readers, and ham comments that are relevant to the discussion and point to websites that are relevant to the readers (by virtue of usually being run by the author of the comment and thus sharing at least some elements).

Suppose that tommorrow, someone posts an original and interesting comment on one of my articles, yet links it to a credit rating website. Should I accept the comment as such, block it, or publish it without the link?

One of the main reasons why people comment on the blogs of other people is to improve their visibility on the internet. If I post a comment on a well-known blog, hundreds and thousands of people will browse over that comment, a small percentage of these will find my writing worthy enough to follow the link and end up on my blog, and an even smaller percentage will become regulars, posting comments and subscribing to my feeds. Which is good, of course, because the more comments I get on my blog, the more interesting it becomes.

This means that commenting is often quite similar to advertising one’s own blog or website. People allow commercial advertising on their blogs (ad banners and such) to get money in return, and they allow personal blog/website advertising on their blogs to get comments in return. So, I guess if an irrelevant website was linked to by a genuinely interesting comment, I would publish that comment (of course, restrictions do apply: I would not allow all websites, just like I would not allow all ad banners).

I like the blogs with good comment advertising—where I can browse the comments and find links to interesting websites.

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