Comment Spam Has Gotten Outrageous!
Thank goodness for Akismet and captchas and all of the other tricks and tools that prevent spam comments from showing up here.
You wouldn’t believe how many attempts I get, though! For years, spam comments all sounded either like lists of online poker games or porn sites. Then they sounded like insincere, general flattery – “This is a really great article on this topic!” – with a link to the spammer’s website in the name somewhere.
But it has gotten outrageous! This is bad enough:
“Stop Link Spam…
[...] Every once in a while we choose blogs that we read or services that we use. Here is the wordpress plugin that we use to stop spamy links. We love our website clean. [...]……” (Ellipses, oddly enough, are theirs not mine. They chose to post it looking like that.)
Excuse me. Did… did you just spam me to try to promote something that’s supposed to keep you from spamming me?
Ten bucks says whatever it is will infect my computer with something horrible. With several horrible somethings.
But this was really out of control. I’ve seen more and more of this kind of comment spam lately – a twist on the insincere fake flattery gimmick:
“Next time I read your blog, Hopefully it doesnt disappoint me as much as this. I am talking about, Yes, it was my substitute for read, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to express. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix if you werent too busy looking for attention.”
The nice thing is that it’s all automated, so they don’t even check to see if they’re saying something relevant. This might be believable on a personal blog, but certainly not on a website of candy reviews.
But talk about adding insult to injury! I weep for the vulnerable teenager (or adult!) who is already spinning out, shares about it on their blog, and gets spam like that. I assume that they think that people will approve their comments just to argue with them? Or maybe they’ve never realized that there are spam blockers in the first place. Either way, how can anybody be that much of a dick?
Back in the day of newsgroups and listservs, before the internet had pictures, people used to be very strict about not posting off-topic stuff. So on, say, a discussion forum about cars, people would add an “obligatory car reference” at the end of their off-topic post. Over time, this quickly got shortened to “ObCars”.
ObCandy: In the candy bag of life, these people wouldn’t even be the licorice bits. They’d be the Bertie Botts’ vomit-flavored jelly beans that you accidentally bite into because you thought you were grabbing strawberry daiquiri or tutti fruitt.
