Spamcommentology, Part I: Seeking Fake Advice

So one of the regular housekeeping chores involved with running a blog is of course reviewing spam comments. I mean, you don’t have to do it; you can just ignore your spam comments, and let them be fully managed and deleted automatically by your anti-spam plugin. (And you do need an anti-spam plugin. Oh boy do you need an anti-spam plugin.) But if you never review the comments on your spam list, you will miss the (very) occasional real comment that gets caught up in the dragnet, and you don’t really want to leave someone twisting in the wind after they took the time to write a comment, do you?

Anyway, this isn’t really a post about blog spam maintenance; it’s about the blog spam itself, in which, over the course of time, one begins to find patterns. It doesn’t take long, because spammers use bots, and bots are by their nature not exactly imaginative. You see the same things over and over and over again, which at first is tedious, then becomes sort of amusing, then becomes tedious again, until, eventually, you’re like, Hey, maybe I can get some blog posts out of this. Because blog post topics don’t grow on trees, but spam sure does. So for the next few weeks let’s look at some broad categories and concrete examples of spam comments, to wit, this week’s category:

“Seeking Fake Advice” Spam

This is a pretty common category of spam, though by no means the most common category (which is, of course, porn spam). With this sort of spam, the spambot pretends to have a question that Only You Can Answer. The fact that the topic on which the spambot is inquiring has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff on your site in general, or the particular post onto which the spam is being glommed, is no impediment to this sort of spam. Here are some examples:

Tune in next week for more examples of the sort of stuff that one has to wade through when doing bulk-deletion of spam comments, when the category will be one that’s closely related to Seeking Fake Advice Spam: Fake Technical Support Request Spam!