If you have never dealt with spam in your blog, you may not be aware of this, but spam comments are nice. They are, in fact, the nicest, kindest, sweetest comments you'll ever get in your blog. The comments humans actually write tend to be much less nice in comparison.
Let's take a look at some examples.
I have been exploring for a bit for any high-quality articles or blog posts on this kind of area .
Exploring in Yahoo I at last stumbled upon this web site.
Studying this info So i am glad to convey that I've an incredibly
just right uncanny feeling I found out just what I needed.I most unquestionably will make sure to do not forget this web site
Spam comment posted on [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website], date: 2024-11-16.
and provides it a glance on a relentless basis.
Oh my goodness! Incredible article dude! Thank you, However I
Spam comment posted on [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website], date: 2024-11-02.
am going through issues with your RSS. I don't understand why I cannot join it.
Is there anybody else having the same RSS problems?
Anyone who knows the answer will you kindly respond? Thanx!!
After looking at a few of the blog posts on your site,
I seriously like your way of writing a blog.
I book-marked it to my bookmark site list and will be checking back in the near future.Take a look at my website as well and tell me your opinion.
Spam comment posted on [Google Trends], date: 2024-11-16.
Hey! Someone in my Facebook group shared this website with us so I
Spam comment posted on [Google Trends], date: 2024-11-11.
came to check it out. I'm definitely loving
the information. I'm bookmarking and will be tweeting this to my followers!
Terrific blog and outstanding style and design.
Great post. I was checkkng continuously this blog and I
Spam comment posted on [How to Add Text in Krita from Inkscape (PNG File Layer Method)], date: 2024-11-02.
am impressed! Extremely useful information particularly the last part :) I care for such info
much. I was looking for tis certain info for a very long time.
Hey there! I know this is kind of off-topic but I had
to ask. Does building a well-established website like yours take a massive amount work?I'm brand new to operating a blog however I do write in my journal on a daily basis.
I'd like to start a blog so I can easily share my own experience
Spam comment posted on [Powered by Google], date: 2024-11-09.
and views online. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or tips for
new aspiring blog owners. Appreciate it!
It's truly a great and useful piece of information. I'm glad thatt you simply
Spam comment posted on [How to Run a Program as a Different User in Linux Mint], date: 2024-11-08.
shared this helpful information with us. Please keep us informed
like this. Thanks for sharing.
Wow, marvelous blog layout! How long have you been blogging for?
you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your web site is
Spam comment posted on [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website], date: 2024-11-07.
excellent, let alone the content!
The RSS one is kind of scary, because at least it talked about the content of the article. I guess this is the "AI" revolution we've waited so much for?
You may be wondering how do I know that these are all spam. It's actually very obvious.
And it's so obvious, I'm curious about why is it so obvious.
You see, I pasted every one of those comments as-is, including the line breaks. For some reason, most spam comments have a line break in the middle of a sentence. For example, one of them ends the first line in "but I had" and then in the next line it says "to ask." A lot of them broke the line after the first person pronoun "I."
What kind of person would write like this? I'd expect the average person with zero writing skills to just write the whole thing without any line breaks instead of adding line breaks in the middle of sentences.
It's possible I'm wrong and some of these are just very, very nice real people who happen to have personal blogs and are the only people who post comments in my blog, but somehow I think that's extremely unlikely. It's all spam, and it all sounds very nice.
Perhaps the reason for these unnatural line breaks is that these are written by Chinese, Korean, or Japanese hackers, or some other Asian language where line breaks aren't normally used, so they have no idea where to break the line. Even that sounds unlikely. As it sounds unlikely that a translator software would spell words wrong. Perhaps they spell words wrong so they don't look like a bot? I have absolutely no idea. Where are these line breaks coming from?
Perhaps there was a bug in the software that a spammer wrote? But so many comments have this line break. Are they all using the same software? Is it just one spammer targeting my website? Could it be that WordPress is adding the line break? Could it be that Selenium or whatever software the spammer is using to get around my hidden captcha is adding the line breaks? So many questions. No answers.
What if—if I may put on my shiny tinfoil hat—what if these line breaks are actually textual watermarks?
What if someone is selling an anti-spam plugin for WordPress, and they also develop spam bots for WordPress, and they use breaking the line after the first person pronoun as a way to watermark the comments they generated because no English-speaking person is ever going to end a line in "I" and start the next with "am"? It would require just I\nam to filter this in regex, but although WordPress provides a built-in way to block comments automatically by phrases, you're suppose to write one phrase per line, so there is no way to tell WordPress to block I\nam. What if this is all a conspiracy just to sell more anti-spam plugins?!
When I finally get around to installing an anti-spam plugin I'm going to miss these.
Other Perspectives
- https://www.kith.org/jed/2010/04/23/flattering-comment-spam/ (accessed 2024-11-16)