A little bit of maxsroom.org spring cleaning has been going on. First, I finally registered a URL for my index of free crochet patterns; you can find Chained Links now at the highly mnemonic chainedlinks.com. A nice side effect was that it made it trivially easy for me to plug in Google search over the index pages. I also trimmed out the dead links, updated my backlog of new links, and it’s now cataloging over 2000 patterns.
On the less upbeat side, I’ve been tracking the number of spam messages I get on the e-mail account associated with this page every day for the past year now. I went back and looked at some of the stats, and it’s staggering. April 2003, I averaged 3.04 spams a day. So far, April 2004 is averaging at 31.89 messages a day, and even if you want to discount for the month just starting, March 2004 had an average of 19.74 per day. The high mark was August 2003 when I averaged 34.64 due to a two day streak of 226 and then 267 spams. Since then, the average hasn’t dropped back under 10 a day, and has hoovered closer to 20 a day.
In other words, the spam problem is measurably worse than this time last year, and there’s a steady upwards trend.
Still, this is not as bad as the story a friend just told me of having to go into her office every morning and throw out the spams that have been faxed to her office overnight. What’s worse, while they do have to include a number to call to be taken off their list, if you read the fine print most of them state that if you call you will be charged $5 a minute. In other words, it’s cheaper to just let them waste your paper and ink.