Tastier than usual, though....
This morning my routine cleaning out of the accumulated comment spam sent to Ethics Alarms revealed either that spammers are developing a keen sense of irony, or that their hypocrisy knows no bounds. The following comment, for some reason attached to the Stephen Sondheim Ethics Hero article, read…
“Excellent post! I have been looking for just such information. Your site is a good resource…a little too spammy, though.”
The author of the post was named “Penis Enlargement Pills.”
Ethics Alarms 
I have a longterm event on Facebook. Occasionally, someone will post chain letters like, “Ten years ago, a girl died in a car accident and haunted a stretch of Rte 126. If you hold your breath, grind up a Flinstones vitamin and blow the powder at a three legged dog, AND POST THIS TO TEN EVENTS, your crush will do something tomorrow.”
For the moment, I’ve only been deleting it after commenting (sometimes quite rudely) something to the effect of “Spam is not welcome here.” There IS an option that says, “Report for Spam,” but I’m not sure if that’s meant to report people who aren’t actually trying to sell something, but are just idiots. Of couse, if these dopes got their accounts deleted for spam for these chain letters, I would have no problem with it.
Are chain letters better or worse than spam if they’re not trying to sell something, yet are perpetuated by the complicity of morons?
I get event notifications from friends all the time, hundreds of the, plus unsolicited invitations to take dumb quizzes and other Facebook time-wasters. They are the equivilent of Spam, but I think of them as part of the package I agreed to tolerate by using the damn thing. I think a “report as idiots” option would be very useful. You should write “Freddie the Frog Reports an Idiot”.
1st – Control notifications under your account settings. Limit the amount of email that you receive.
2nd – When viewing your newsfeed, you can hover your mouse over any post and an ‘x’ will appear on the right side. Once you click it, you can block this individual message, messages from this person, or if it was from an application, block messages from the application. (Say Jack Marshall plays farmville, when I click the ‘x’ next to his post saying he needs water for his corn, I get to choose “Block all posts by Farmville”. Now I get Jack’s posts, but not when he’s playing Farmville.)