Jason C. McLean

Has a robot ever asked you something? Probably, if you count computers asking you simple questions like “Are you sure you want to shut down?” Has a robot ever pleaded with you. Probably not. But today, one did with me, and it’s not the first time.

“Please don’t delete this,” it pleaded, “I need lots of money right now.”

The robot in question, some sort of marketing spambot, followed up it’s post with a link to some site where you can get pills. The ones a few month ago offered the same intro plea followed by links to some porn site and some stock site.

Now, maybe there is one real person behind each of these ads and maybe that person does need some cash, but forgive me for not wanting to offer charity to struggling porn or pill vendors who have plenty of opportunity elsewhere on the net to hawk their wares.

While I find it amusing how marketers are trying to give their robots personalities designed to elicit sympathy from bloggers, I spend too much time deleting spam messages from my e-mail and figuring out a way to block spammers from a message board I’m trying to get back up and running to want to devote any more time to deleting their messages here, so, I’m now gonna moderate comments on this blog.

I’ll let (almost) everything that’s written about one of my posts through, and even plugs for stuff I find interesting, but no more robots, unless of course, they make one smart enough to debate this post.