Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category

A charming individual, dklover@hotmail.com, has been posting abusive comments (now deleted) on an old post of mine, accusing me of over reacting when I laid into some idiots who decided to use the word gay as an insult.

His/her latest missive is presented below, as he/she didn’t included any punctuation I’ve had to guess where one sentence ends and the next begins.

you must be the biggest loser on earth not one person has wrote to you for a long time so i thought i should say some thing

A few facts first, since your last comment on 23rd November, six people have posted comments here (some multiple times, hi Jack) and a further three people have commented on the LJ mirror of this blog. As I’ve only posted seven posts in that time that’s fair number of commenters for a modest little personal blog like this.

your last comments were quite rude implying that im gay and bigot

They were meant to be rude. You came to my web site and attacked me, you reap what you sow.

However, I did not imply that you were gay – I suggested that you might have fun in a gay bar, something that lots of straight people do all the time. Also, I did not imply that you were a bigot – I stated it clearly.

well thats a big word for a small minded person like your self you are strait up and down stupid and i dont have to go off at the deep end like your self and try and use words hat you dont even understand good one brainiack

Bigot. Five letters, two syllables, easy to pronounce, quite easy to define. That may be a big word to you – judging by your spelling, punctuation and grammar you have problems with the English language. However, as your IP address resolves to the Netherlands you may well not be a native speaker.

ha ha ha your such a fool i await your reply wich im sure will be inthrouling

Did you mean enthralling? I don’t know about that, but I’m sure this post will raise a smile or two somewhere.

Today I got a comment spam, nothing very unusal just the normal online poker thing. But what was odd, and novel, about it was that the two dozen or so links in the comment all had rel="nofollow" as part of the link code.

Hang on, I thought, isn’t nofollow supposed to be defeating comment spam? (It’s not intended to stop comment spam hitting your blog, at least not straight away, but it is intended to make comment spam less attractive to search engines thus eventually killing it off by reducing the ROI.)

So why would a spammer send out comment spam with nofollow already included?

It could be that the spammer in question is an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Nice thought but most spammers are actually quite smart. I know it doesn’t look like it when you receive a million penis/breast enlargement spams which (a) you don’t need anyway 😉 and (b) don’t apply to your half of the population, but they are playing the numbers game in a big, and profitable, way and they do know what they’re doing.

So maybe they’ve discovered that some blogs are letting comments through without moderation so long as they have rel="nofollow" on all links, coupled with search engines that don’t yet support this new “standard”.

Or maybe they’re just experimenting to see if the above case is true anywhere. Damn I hate my blog being used as a lab rat.

Any thoughts?