Spam? No comment!
One of my regular chores at ESET is checking, approving/discarding and, on occasion, responding to blog comments. Surprisingly enough, apart from the benefits of talking to people who make sensible comments – yes, it really does happen sometimes – I actually get some entertainment value out of some of the more way-out comment spam.Here's one I just picked up and really rather liked, in a non-Facebook, non-admiring sort of way:
When I originally commented I clicked the "Notify me when modish comments are added" checkbox and contemporarily each time an annotation is added I deject d swallow four emails with the word-for-word comment. Is there any character you can separate me from that service? Thanks!
Apart from the splendidly fractured English – automatic translation tools have a lot to answer for – I imagine that quite a few bloggers have taken messages like this to heart and offered advice on not getting accidentally spammed by a blog post you were tracking. Not noticing that the “name” of the poster is actually an advertisement (in this case, a casino) even if there's no spam link.
Wondering how much use had been made of this particular ploy, I did a little googling and discovered that there have indeed been lots of variations. I also tripped over a blog article that turned out to be a veritable gold mine – well, fool's gold mine perhaps – of comment spam. Fortunately, it seems that links were being stripped by default (we do the same thing at ESET). However, we also moderate comments, so you're unlikely to find an ESET blog article with 125 spammy blog comments attached. But ,while scrolling through this particular collection, I found one or two more examples I hadn't seen before, and which caused me further amusement. In particular, this one:
You should really control the comments at this website
That was posted by someone called: Full Time Jobs Napier Field. J
I feel a longer article on comment spam coming on. In the meantime, I'm bookmarking that article. While I'm not a student of the occult, I now know exactly which comments to go to for advice on fatty liver, tax problems, jobseeking in Alabama, a need for Viagra, and candle-making for kids.
