Spamcommentology, Part IV: Word Salad, Plus Bonus Category: It’s A Conspiracy!

Hello and welcome to yet another installment of Spamcommentology! This week we’ll be looking at Word Salad, with a bonus look at the “It’s a Conspiracy!” category. Now, the Word Salad type of comment is, as you may have guessed, when the spambot just throws a bunch of words into a comment, presumably in the hope of fooling spam filters with heaps of text, as well as to overcome any minimum-length requirements that a site may have. Mostly Word Salad comments are merely gibberish; sometimes they seem to sort of quasi-make sense, until you actually try to parse them; and sometimes they rise almost to the level of some sort of koan, as if an abstract impressionist painting decided to upchuck a poem. Here are a few examples:

Now, I mentioned there would be a bonus example of “It’s a Conspiracy!” type spam comments. This type of spam is fairly uncommon, and also tends to have odious content (e.g., Holocaust denialism, anti-semitism, racism, etc.) which I wouldn’t reproduce here even for the purpose of making fun of it. But then, occasionally, you get conspiracy-type spam comments that are just silly, to wit:

Now of course, Illuminati conspiracy theories go way back, and have persisted throughout the last few centuries, up to and including present day with the whole “New World Order” thing. But apparently the Illuminati have gotten tired of just pulling all the strings from the shadows and are now advertising for membership. And they want to give you … A NEW CAR! And special treatment in all airports everywhere in the world! And, uh, a golf membership. And access to the Bohemian Grove, whatever that is. And a direct deposit payment of $81 million a month. And if you act now, you also get to rule the world! And … hmm, how is it that Dennis the Vizsla never tried to join the Illuminati as one of his get-rich-quick schemes? Seems like I missed an obvious story arc there.

Anyway, tune in next week for the final installment (for now) of Spamcommentology!