Why do I have all these spammy MySpace comments?

Oh, how I know what you're talking about. If you're on MySpace for more than a few weeks, it seems inevitable that spammers and scammers are going to find you and start testing to see if they can get links on your profile.

When you get a comment like this:

On the surface it seems like a legit message, but if this person really wanted to communicate with me and get my opinion of his "free ebook" then he'd email me, right? Further, this is the 21st century version of the "run a classified ad telling people how to make money -- by them running a classified ad!" because his free ebook is about how to use people's MySpace comment areas to advertise your product or service. Ho hum.

This is just barely, just barely under the bar for me because it's not offensive and there's no inappropriate graphics, the product isn't too bad, so I let it stay on my site.

A much more pleasant version of this same sort of exploitation of MySpace comments is demonstrated with this message:

Wes is still taking advantage of the search engine benefits of reinforcing a specific keyword phrase, in this case both Burien Homes and cell phones. Again, this comment is for the benefit of the commenter, not anything for my benefit or the benefit of people reading my profile, y'know?

There are far worse examples of utter garbage in comments, and there are also downright nasty comments that some people leave, comments that exploit Javascript holes to transmit viruses and other distinctly antisocial activities.

At the end of the day, I like getting comments from people who actually have read my profile and have something nice or interesting to share, but I really don't like opening up my own MySpace profile to random drive-by billboards, and I imagine that you're the same.

Fortunately, it's not hard to click the "Delete this Comment" link and zap those comments you don't like. Better yet, if they don't come back and check your profile, they'll never know the comment was deleted anyway.

Finally, if you want to check out my MySpace profile, please visit Dave Taylor on MySpace and don't forget that I have lots more MySpace help here too.