If one maintains a blog, one gets, inevitably, a lot of spam.
No joke. The ratio of spam comments to real ones for this blog, over its three and a half years of operation, is something like 15 to 1.
And if one maintains a blog over a reasonable period of time – like three and a half years – one starts to notice trends in the spam.
Now, I know what you’re thinking – what kind of saddo looks at the spam comments on his blog? Well, some bloggers, doubtless of greater moral fortitude than me, never look in their spam folder, but I admit that I check mine once in a while. After all, at 15-to-1 spam-to-real, one doesn’t want to throw out any real comments along with the spam.
So over the years. I have become something of a connoisseur of spam
There is, of course, a permanent background level of the stuff in the usual categories you would expect, like P*rnSpam (offers of sites with rude pictures) and DrugSpam (offers of cut-price pharmaceuticals). There are also the hybrids, like P*rnDrugSpam – which typically offer a range of, er, chemical enhancements, mostly, but not limited to, cut-price knock-off versions of Pfizer’s most celebrated product.
Over the years, though, there has been an interesting tendency for the spam to become less obviously spammy – far less multi-URL LinkSpam, for instance – and more sneakily comment-y.
Some of this stuff simply offers a random comment like:
“Cool blog!”
– and the link back to the spamsite. Or often the link appears only in the supposed title of the blog that sent the Spam-comment.
Others offer longer comments than this, though typically not much more interesting.
Then there are the odd ones that seem to have been generated by random cut-up of words or phrases. This is a particular favourite Spam Category of mine. Who knew spam-bots were William Burroughs fans?
And very, very occasionally, one happens across something inadvertently funny.
For instance, the other day one arrived that began:
“Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for.”
Heh. Was the spam-bot related to Forrest Gump, I asked myself?
Or was the Spam-bot a Spam-bot-philosopher? Because the next line was:
“Un-returnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates.”
Anyway, for some reason this comment, with its philosophical gloom, reminded me oddly of the line Mrs Dr Aust usually uses when I am complaining – as I often am during busy parts of the year, or when the kids are sick, or when we are short of sleep, or all of the above at the same time, like several points this Winter – about being fat, or feeling knackered, or old. Or, indeed, whenever I say something like:
“!**!! – why does life have to be such a bloody struggle?”
To which she responds, far more philosophically than I can muster, with:
“At least it’s better than any of the alternatives”
Which, if you can believe it, usually leaves me quite without riposte. Apart from a ruminative:
“Hmmm”.
Dr Aust's Spleen 