So a while back I did a series on all the various types of spam comments that turn up on the blog, but since then, I’ve seen a few examples of something new. These are comments that are clearly automated*, yet are also clearly related to** the posts upon which they purport to be commenting. I suspect these comments are coming from the APIs for so-called chatbots, such as ChatGPT***. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading “Spamcommentology: Attack of the ChatBots”Tag: spam
Spamcommentology: Matchmaker Matchmaker
So this week, in addition to the usual sorts of spam, I got one that reads like a sort of mail-order bride ad. Wait, are mail-order bride ads still a thing?* Would it be an international dating site ad now? Well anyway, whatever it is, it’s quite obviously fake, and spam.
Spamcommentology: Well That’s Suspiciously Specific
Those who frequent the excellently time-wasting site TV Tropes may be familiar with the trope “Suspiciously Specific Denial“:
Spamcommentology: When The Windshield Doesn’t Know What The Doors Are Doing
You can’t please all of the van all of the time, but apparently you can please some of the van some of the time. And sometimes at the same time.
Hmm, I wonder if the van is carpeted inside … 🤔
Spamcommentology, Part V: Porn (You Knew It Was Coming*)
So this week we’ve arrived at the climax** of my Spamcommentology series, with a very common sort of spam comment. I would ask the reader to take a wild guess what this category is, but since I already bared it all in the title, I’ll just get right down to it! (Incidentally, this kind of spam always includes links, but I’ve taking the liberty of stripping said links from the screen shots.)
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part V: Porn (You Knew It Was Coming*)”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:
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part IV: Word Salad, Plus Bonus Category: It’s A Conspiracy!”Spamcommentology, Part III: Praise and Insults
Now that we’ve dispensed with the fake advice and fake technical support spam, it’s time to look at another common category: Fake praise and fake insults. The fake praise is designed to get you to approve it even though it’s clearly B.S., and the fake insults are designed to provoke a response even though they, too, are clearly B.S. For example:
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part III: Praise and Insults”Spamcommentology, Part II: Seeking Fake Technical Support (And Fake Technical Comments In General)
So last week I posted some examples of spam where the spambot was allegedly seeking advice about various things, such as blogging platforms, AOL, and sex toy manufacturers. This week I’m back with a somewhat related category of spam, in which the spambot either claims that there’s something wrong with your site which they beseech you to fix, or else tries to make it sound like they are totally hip to today’s technology and so are you. Unfortunately, it seems like spambots don’t get updated regularly, and so these sorts of comments are often hilariously out of date. To wit:
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part II: Seeking Fake Technical Support (And Fake Technical Comments In General)”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?
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part I: Seeking Fake Advice”You’re Not Even Trying Anymore
Viscosity 