Saturday, November 19, 2011

Delicious spam

Image: Sp'am, served with corn kernels and chilli peppers on a bed of autumn leaves.
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license by Neil Motteram. November 2, 2005; San Francisco, California.

Yesterday I deleted my first Spam comment. When I enabled the possibility to comment anonymously, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I never thought I'd have to face it this soon.

I was expecting, at the least, to have ten people commenting, which would allow spam comments to go almost unnoticed. I would later discover that this would mean I had to have a readership of at least 1,000, which is clearly impossible unless I update more frequently... which is clearly impossible if I want to actually finish college.

The thing is, it wasn't a blatant spam comment. You could tell the spammer put a little thought into it. The link was not to a site known for its spam, and it was actually relevant to the post it was in. However, as the only thing the post contained was the link, it simply could not be interpreted as any other way than spam, and so I had to delete it.

Image: one stick figure asks another, "But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License by Randall Munroe

Now, I don't mean the typical "this is a great blog!" spam comment (those are actually spammers' response to this comic). The one I got was obviously written by a human, apparently searching for every blog post with his site's keywords. If this person was hired to do this, I must say, that's very, very sad.

I'm not going to tell you what the comment was because, as I said, the site linked to is not a bad site that exists exclusively from spam. I don't want to put out a bad word for them.

Also, it'll give you a bit of a puzzle if you ever have a lot of free time :)

1 comment: