Walt at Random

Time for another cheap-and-easy post, partly because I’m focusing on my new project (a real book through a real publisher), partly because the number of comments trapped by Spam Karma 2 has gone up a lot in the last few days–60 for the last 24 hours, 53 the previous day, as compared to 20-30 most days–and because some of them are so bizarre.

Take this one:

Why did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. Ill post it again. Hi guys, I’ve a brilliant way to make alot of money online making blogs…

There’s more, but that’s enough. Let’s see: It was a comment, not a post. I didn’t remove it; Spam Karma trapped it as spam–properly. Learning punctuation wouldn’t hurt. And your comment is entirely irrelevant to the post. Other than that, well, maybe I just don’t like “useful comments” that disparage other comments. (I now see a different version of this post–lacking the first three sentences–at least four different times over a four-hour period, always from different usernames, always nicely trapped.) Oh, look: The followup comment once more and the earlier version twice more…

Here’s another one, praising Apple’s app store and disparaging Microsoft and the Zune–which, apart from being posted on, um, the wrong blog for MS-haters, was targeted at a post about our photovoltaic system. Relevance, anybody?

There are also the repeated spamments about creating short films on the topic of one of my posts (I’m SO flattered) and wanting my comments. Since two of those are targeted at a post updating the Liblog 2010 project…well, you know, I’m just guessing nobody’s done short films on that project.

There seem to be repeated spamments asking what theme I use for this blog. Assuming spammers actually read the posts, it’s LetterHead 1.0 by Robin Hastings, with significant modifications by yours truly.

Now, back to the writing…

Added Saturday, August 7: Good Gaia! 80, count them, EIGHTY spamments in the last 24 hours…at this rate, I’ll have to give up scanning them for possible errors. (Typically one legitimate comment gets marked as spam every couple of months…when I’m getting real comments at all, that is.)

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 7:38 am and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.