Here’s a wonderful little comment I got on a past article:
“I found your blog via Google while searching for camping and your post regarding camping store Marathon having end-of-lease sale | A Word in the Woods by Michael Zimmermann looks very interesting for me. I go camping every weekend during the summer months and I have found your site extremely valuable in some camping tips. Thanks!”
Now what bugs me is that they could have promoted their site quite nicely by actually posting something useful, and (well, let’s face it, not from my traffic) would have legitimately interested readers as potential customers. Instead, they manage to fill the internet with useless noise that makes everything harder to find, do, and learn. Along with the comment was a link to a site that I will now never endorse or promote. Good going. I’m sure everybody would be comfortable with the ethical promotional tactics they use, and I’m sure they conduct all aspects of their business with the same approach.
I’m going to continually mark these people as spam, and my apologies if you get a legitimate comment flagged – just don’t make it an obvious script-generated bunch of text (love the title in the above quote?), and you should be fine.
Please note that SPAM, the lunch meat, is quite a different story, and this is as good a place as any to applaud their great sense of humour when it comes to the unfortunate direction their trademark has taken with the internet. I’m sure many a family has much fondness for this wonderful loaf of meat in a tin, and the role it has played in many a car-camping trip.