Spam pisses me off. The meat kind is marginally acceptable; the electronic kind really angers me. On separate occasions, I encountered mass amounts of spam today: the archives of a BioSQL mailing list and the comments section of the biohackathon. The mailing list's archive for March had 24/30 (80%) junk entries, advertising mostly Viagra and Cialis. The overwhelming predominance of spam is the reason why I don't join the mailing list myself. It's very frustrating because the mailing list has really helpful hints on how to use BioSQL--a major component of my class project. The website for the biohackathon, also a page with information on Open Bioinformatics Foundation projects was even more littered with spam-like garbage. Most comments were for lyrics sites, online casinos, other people blogs... nothing to do with bioinformatics in general even. A total of four--if even that--were legitimate comments actually pertaining to the site on the latest post. Given that there were 160 posts, less than 3% of the comments were even relevant. Were any of these 4 posts interesting? No, but that's beside the point.

I don't understand what people hope to gain with their unsolicited comments. It's not like I'm going to click on any of the links. I don't need Viagra or Cialis (and I'm grateful I don't). If I need lyrics, Google works just as efficiently. Reading random people's blogs is ok, but I'd much prefer reading ones of people I know. I don't care to waste my money and time with online casinos. I find it hard to believe--aside from the blundering idiot who might be fooled by the "This is interesting web place. I like it." posts--that anyone who reads these pages has any interest in the links. It's just such a shame. The internet was created to facilitate scientific communication. My guess is that subscribers of the BioSQL mailing list get more junk mail in their electronic inboxes than they do in their paper mailboxes at their respective institutions.