“Down with spam! Up with Vioxx!”

If you blog, you may have noticed that you tend to get lots of spam comments. Lots. Possibly even three or four orders of magnitude more spam comments than legitimate posts. (Use WordPress? Run Akismet. Seriously.) Speaking personally, in my comment moderation queue, I see that Ab, Ada, Addie, Addison and Azox have taken offense to the high amount of spam on my blog:

“Spam really sucks :( delete it“
“Delete this spam!“
“No more spam, man!“
“Is it possible to delete all this spam?“
“You have so much spam in here.. :(“

Unfortunately, I actually don’t have any spam in here. Also, all five of them have the same IP, seemingly randomly-generated Yahoo and Hotmail email addresses, and have provided URLs that want to sell me Viagra, ringtones and Nelly Furtado lyrics. For some reason. So that’s giving me some cause to consider the possibility that they might not simply be confused.

This sort of “hey, I’m a real comment, everyone” spam generally follows the form of, “That’s really interesting. I agree. Visit my site.” Some go further, containing a great deal more text completely unrelated to the blog post. These are the ones that I find most entertaining.

I particularly liked this one:

I feel like a fog, but so it goes. I just don’t have much to say right now, but it’s not important. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me recently, but pfft. Not much on my mind right now. I can’t be bothered with anything lately. I’ve just been sitting around not getting anything done.

Wow, dude. That sounds like it could be pretty serious. Those aren’t the words of someone who has everything under control! Neither are the dozen links to sites on mortgage refinancing accompanying them.

Of course, the vast majority of spammers just post 40-line lists of links, but that’s boring. Seriously, who’s going to moderate that up? Sometimes you have to actually go the extra mile and invest in some creativity. Sadly, only one spammer has produced anything clever enough to fool me — if only for a second. I think the trick in this case was that it seems to have been hand-written, not generated by a bot. As “Ricky Conway” commented upon last year’s post, “LOLcat art show? I am definitely going to this.”:

I was there with my family. The four of us. My partner, son and Lisa. Lisa is my cat. It was worthwhile. It was amazing and the work was real artistic. Do you happen to know when would Marianne Goldin be putting up a similar show at Vancouver?
…………………………………..
Ricky Conway

Wait, what? Her show was in Vancouver, Ricky! Also, why are you linking to “www.hookup-tonite.com”?

Actually, I really wanted to leave this one up, just because it’s so random. Also, it sounds as if the author is drunk and possesses basically no reading comprehension whatsoever. In the end, I realized spam is spam. So I reproduced it here instead. Sneaky!

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