molly.com
Thursday 8 December 2005
Best. Spam. Ever.
TELL ME YOUR BEST COMMENT SPAM EVER!
I just got a really good one, if not the best:
“Thanks for useless info!”
I would understand this better had it been a real comment instead of just spam.
What’s your favorite comment spam ever?
Filed under: blogging, humor, pop culture, society, software
Posted by: Molly | 05:22 | Comments (36)
I agree.
I don’t have the text anymore, but I had one comment spam from a someone selling blank banjo tab paper – quite a niche market, I would have thought!
The post was utterly unrelated to banjos.
Heh, I got that same spam comment this morning.
Don’t have a fave one though. Never bother reading it. As soon as I realize it’s spam, I delete it.
I just got this yesterday:
I think the best one I had was after applying some comment spam filtering to one of my sites.
It read “Well done, you’ve cleaned up all the spam.”
I don’t really remember any specific ones, but I know among some of my favorites were quotes from famous authors and speakers.
Old posts on my blog also seem to pick up a lot of Christian weirdos who seem to think my comments are good places to post Bible verses and misspelled prayers. I’ve nicknamed them “Prayer Spam” but they’re not really spam because they rarely leave a website… I think they’re just confused computer illterate people who post them…
The best I ever had were evidently from some poor sweatshop worker sat manually finding sites to spam. It said “If you are the owner for this site, please delete this comment. I feel so dirty for doing this”.
Loved it!
Something about “I loved your post, would you like to check out my site on powerboats and timeshares”… uhhh
(nikkiana, don’t knock the Christian weirdos
man, I love spam! It’s like the new abstractionism, but in words. Poetic.
Not sure what the content was, but the name on one I got the other day was great: Pitchman A. Intoxicants
mmm, intoxicants
When I’m bored, I’ll translate some of the Chinese spam I get. This one was a fav:
The mail like brings inconveniently to you, asks respectfully to forgive!
Nothing like the typical:
—————–
“Nice Site. I like it very much
http://www.yahoo.com
—————–
I always thought, what’s up with the link to Yahoo??
These days, they try to stroke my ego. Usually, a comment spam starts off with something like, “Hey, I really like your website,” and then launches into nonsesne phrases which link to bizarre sites. I guess they’re counting on my not actually reading past the first sentence before approving or deleting the comment.
Funny story behind the spam I get. Before I decided to switch to TXP I was using Blogger. A few days ago I got a message on a forum I belong to asking me how I get so many comments on Blogger. I had no clue what the poster was talking about so I surfed over to my old blogspot blog and found 48 comments on one post and 38 on another. Almost every single one went something like this:
Nice site, I’ll be sure to bookmark it. You may be interested in blah blah blah
I got another that I actually though was real for a while. It was from a spammer named beth detailing her trips back and forth to the local gym. kind of disturbing actually.
I got a weird series of comments some time back that was advertising something like a civil engineering services out of China as best as I could tell. Strange.
Just 5 minutes ago:
“McDonals is s**t! F**k capitalism! Hurray for social equalty!” — but in caps.
I hardly ever get comment spam these days. I attribute it to a four-pronged defense strategy:
1. Wordpress has pretty good built-in filtering to start with.
2. I run Bad Behavior to shut out nasty botses that send malformed headers.
3. An extensive segment of my .htaccess file is devoted to blocking referrer spam, and in my experience comment spambots tend to pass along referrer spam as well. Rejecting the bad referrer prevents them from dropping a comment to boot.
4. Nobody knows my blog exists, not even spammers. Security through obscurity, baby.
What’s the bet that the examples of comment spam I just posted have been caught in your spam filter?
I must say, I’m taken aback by people referring to “nice site” as comment spam. It really comes off as snobbish to look down on someone who’s just offering a compliment. It’s not like the person stands to gain anything from telling you that your site is nice.
“Nice site. Want to buy a timeshare in Florida?” on the other hand I’d consider as comment spam.
I don’t get all that much blog spam, my filters block most of it so I never ever see it. Those that do get through usually just contain a few words like “check out this site” or “buy cheap [product name]“.
But, I do get some interesting e-mail spam. I swear, if any of it was legitimate, I’d be a millionare with all the lotteries I’ve won, business proposals and inheritence.
Any chain letter. Some of them are so funny, especially when they say how you need to forward the messages to 30 someodd people, or your life will be ruined.
I don’t have my own Blog – yet. But, in my e-mail 2 strangers want to give me 80 million bucks to regain their rightfull place as King of Bulgaria. It had a name and e-mail address so they slipped past Googles gmail blockers. In three months, Google has caught close to 2500 spams and hundred of those irritating “pop ups”.
I started collecting the sender names used by spammers b/c they were getting really funny. Why the middle initial? Here’s this week:
Indentations K. Canoe
Interlude D. Snowshed
Cretan C. Carryout
Gelatine S. Mice
Lurid K. Numbly
Trusty H. Pore
name: me
status: visitor
improvements: this page sniffs poo
additional_comments: poo
browser: Netscape 5.0 (Windows; en-US)
screenres: 1280×1024
COMMENT SPAM EVER! COMMENT SPAM EVER! COMMENT SPAM EVER! COMMENT SPAM EVER! COMMENT SPAM EVER! COMMENT SPAM EVER!???
I get so much of that stuff and it is all funny and pathetic. I do have a question for you though, no comment spam,lol, I miss your blogroll. Are you bringing it back?
Blogroll – I miss it, too. It was a good way to familiarize myself with who’s who in the web standards world. Please consider bringing it back. Thanks.
Ara, what everyone is referring to are comments which say nothing but “nice site” and usually include a link to a spam site. They are automated comments delivered in bulk for purposes of drawing traffic and pagerank. They’re spam by all definitions.
If a live human submits an honest compliment that’s not spam, though it may still be a useless contribution to the discussion so even those can be annoying.
“We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents.”
Honestly, those spammers from Hong Kong slay me.
Yep, the tents one is the best. I was just about to post it when I saw that Ray is also apparently interested in them.
It’s really funny =). Very original and interesting post. Not like most =)
How about
sitting out in your archives right now? article — “mt blacklist tips from the master” posted on Sunday 23 May 2004.
[...] Back in December of ‘05 Molly wrote Best. Spam. Ever. at which time I was lucky enough not to have the problem of comment spam. Fast forward to about a month ago and suddenly my post and suddenly my post Proper URI design started to gain the attention not of fellow web-heads, but of spammer-freaks. Who knows, it could have been my immensely popular post on Coming soon to a theatre near you–I confess, I dugg my own post–that opened me up to the non-web-head crowd. Either way, the comment spam began to flow. [...]
I keep getting spam and I don’t know why. Can someone email me with tips on how to stop this. Many Thanks
kbannon@transpac.com.au
[...] Molly.com: Best. Spam. Ever. [...]
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