I get a lot of spam comments here. It’s inevitable, I suppose. Once you’ve been blogging for a while a certain amount of robots and fuckwits are naturally drawn to the comments section where they shit their rubbish all over the place, telling me what a great blog this is or what an interesting post I wrote while desperately trying to get their link to Viagra or cheaper home loans approved.
The thing that pisses me off is that there are enough absolute idiots out there clikcing on these spam links that it’s clearly worthwhile. If a spammer drops a million comments and 0.1% of people actually click through, and 0.1% of those idiots are actually so dumb that they buy something, then it’s still worthwhile for the spammer. He drops a million spam a day and makes a tidy living off the fact that 0.1% of 0.1% of people have porridge for brains.
It’s fairly Darwinian in its own way, I suppose. Those uber-dicks deserve everything they get. Which is probably having their identity stolen and used to traffic sex slaves across eastern European borders or something. Or maybe I read too much thriller fiction. Regardless, there are unscrupulous dickwads out there and there are brainless morons that fall victim to them. I wish it didn’t happen. I wish it wasn’t part of human nature to prey on those weaker than ourselves, but it is. And there are those that can’t help themselves and ignore their moral inclinations for a quick buck. What are you going to do?
The thing is, what bothers me most about it is that this asshattery gets played out on my website. Since I installed the Akismet spam killer application to this site a couple of years ago it’s caught 52,523 spam comments. Scumbags!
But, on the upside, every once in a while it asks me to manually check a spam comment that it’s not sure about. They’re usually the same lame rubbish, but occasionally you get something quiet poetic. Unintentionally, of course. Probably some Nigerian fraudster trying to sound casual and friendly or something similar. Today I got one that has just the right combination of over-enthusiasm, arse-licking and poor English skills, while being very badly generically written to “apply” to pretty much any post. Spam comment of the week goes to:
Astounding! just what exactly an idea ! regarding concept ! Gorgeous .. Awesome …
Yes, I had exactly an idea. This was on a post about succinctly pitching your book to a publisher or interested party. His spam link was for cheap medical insurance quotes.
It’s bewildering, really.
.
Actually, spam comments make more sense when you consider that they benefit whether people click through or not. The links appearing on other websites in comments can help optimise the offending website in the search engine so that a lot of extra links on a lot of good blogs can mean more people see their website in Google and they attract their customers and make their money that way. Pretty sneaky really. It is possible to make the links in the comments of a blog “no-follow” meaning that Google knows to ignore them, removing any benefit, but I personally prefer to reward those commenters I do want by letting them get that influence. So it’s a case of switching on ‘no’follow’ to discourage some of the spammers who bother to check while penalising your loyal commenters or leaving links unfettered which gives the spammers an excuse…
Well, of course I reward people that actually have some input to the discussion by leaving their links open. That’s a part of blogging and commenting as a whole.
The spammers don’t even get as far as approval, so ‘no follow’ is irrelevant to their links. I kill spammers. I grind them into paste and use them to fill the cracks in my walls. Them and their links.
But most importantly, was the medical insurance any good? It sounds like value for money.
Depends on your interpretation of “value” I would imagine.
I wild about post here. Most important you visit me. Sorry – couldn’t resist.
I keep getting one who repeatedly links to a post of mine that’s several months old.
I have people still spamming posts I made in 2006!