Blog spam is depressingly common (though our filter is top notch); one common spam tactic is a comment which says “hi” or “great post” but then links to some sketchy porn site or gambling or the like. We just got a series of comments which were a variant of those, from some spammer in Italy. I’m not sure if it’s a language issue, if they’re trying to evade filters, or both, but the language was decidedly quirky, enough that it caught my eye. For instance:
What’s up everybody under the sun, I’m chic to the forum and justified wanted to roughly hey. hi leaning touch to comprehend unexplored pepole and slice tackle with them
contain a happy year
I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
What’s up everybody under the sun. Contain a happy year!
Ha, sounds like they tried to use a free translation and it got really jumbled up. That’s a pretty good one. I’m going to slice tackle this Christmas!
That looks like the weird spam emails that try to evade the filters by having uncommon words.
I fear academics in the year 2210 writing papers on literary and evasive devices in the spam genre. It’s found poetry gone evil.
Hey, I am getting more and more of those. I don’t have a filter for them. I just delete them as they pop up.
Another trick is that the links (sometimes including the “Website” link) is a to a very specific google search page.
There is, I presume, a special place in outer darkness for those who waste enormous amounts of resources by spamming blogs and email boxes around the world.
Maybe they just have a thousand monkeys working on a thousand typewriters.
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? What? You stupid monkey!”
I totally want to try to incorporate the phrase “slice tackle” and “contain a happy year” into my vocabulary!
I sense that messages such as the one singled out above originate from people with good intentions. I don’t think spammers are in collusion, but rather they have lives that have been severely tampered with and cursed. If you are a time traveler or alien disgised as human and or have technology to travel physically through time, maybe you can be of assistance. My name is Liliya. I am 26 years old. I am cheerful woman from Russia. Now You have just two options, either to LIVE OR DIE. If you can be of assistance to me, i shall be pleased to give you more details concerning the deposit and how possible the money can be moved out of this country to your country for lucrative business investment opportunities.
I slice tackled my students this year on the final.
Frank, I still remember when you and your colleagues slice tackled me.
hilarious and true. It’s nice to get the funny spams. I hate when pornographic/innapropriate ones make their way through my filter.
Anwyays. Thanks for the laugh.
ps. “slice tackle” classic.
As one who struggles to comprehend unexplored pepole, I welcome all the slice tackle I can get.
My heaviest spammer for the past few weeks has been some piano company in England. I’ve been tempted to order every model in their book and have them — and the shipping bill — sent to Kaimi. Wouldn’t that be chic to the forum?
That one most likely is compiled to spoof search engines by words and combinations of them that spring up in the results when you’re searching for something else.
If a spam like this gets through, a search engine may pick up stuff like “I’m chic” or “I just wanted to roughly” which could be snippets of sentences people search for. I just happen to know there is such a tactic.
I don’t know how common misspelling “pepole” is?
the adjective “sketchy” before porn site is redundant.
I can vouch for Frank slice tackling me in his class.
Sometimes I have to decide whether or not to “fish or cut bait”. Maybe I should face the choice of “fishing or slicing tackle”?
I like the part about containing a happy year. I’d like to contain one, but I’m having a hard enough time containing myself, so I’ll have to work on a year in the future.
I’m a little surprised my warning about bloggers who link to business opportunities through their names or include referral links in their blogs was deleted in a thread about spam.
Peter, I didn’t see your comment in the filter, so I don’t know what happened to it.