A Cautionary Tale
Just to be clear, this is not my first rodeo…er, blog.
Okay, it’s my second. The first one, a food/memoir offering, www.paleogram.com, ran for a few years (it’s still accessible if you click on the link) and it attracted some nice feedback from time to time.
Whenever a reader wrote a comment, I would get an email from WordPress, my content management system, giving me the option of approving or trashing said comment. Since they always had something nice to say, I always gave the comments a thumbs up.
In anticipation of the April, 2021 publication of So Happy Together, my first novel, I’ve started this new website/blog, www.deborahshepherdwrites.com . I’ve posted five essays so far, and from the comments I’ve approved, I know at least a couple of you are reading.
But then, after my most recent essay, I got an email from WordPress about a new post, the content of which would make a sailor blush, as they used to say back in the day. No, much worse than that– it was vile and nauseating and explicit.
I trashed it immediately, without clicking on it.
But the next day, there was another, with a different email address listed, with a similarly foul message.
And then another, and another.
They all had unidentifiable handles with lots of numbers in their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
I’d been invaded by bots!
I didn’t intuit this– someone way more tech-savvy informed me. I had to look the word up:
Bot—an autonomous program on the internet or another network that can interact with systems or users.
But why now? Why in response to this perfectly innocent photo of my adorable dogs wrapped in blankets with an accompanying anecdote about our morning routine whereby I rouse the sleeping pups by singing, which also serves to elevate my mood at the start of another semi-housebound day.
This morning, as I trashed yet another offensive comment, it dawned on me! It was the quite innocent title I had given the blog entry, a title which I perceived as a clever play on words, describing both the dogs’ sleeping habits and the fact that no one else hears my less-than-pitch-perfect renditions except my canine companions. Apparently, though, there is some nefarious algorithm that awakens the sleeping bots whenever a word that might possibly be interpreted as suggestive appears.
I’m not being coy here by not mentioning my previous post’s title in this one (just scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on the forward arrow or the next number if you’d like to read it). I just don’t want to attract any more of those nasty bots.
Which is why I gave this post the most innocent title I could think of, and left off the last word, lest the evil bots twist the synonym for “baby cats” for their own nefarious purposes.