Spammers, You Flatter Me

Some of what I write attracts criticism, and even the occasional hateful comment. It’s nice to see compliments every now and then. What’s not nice is that these days the vast majority of my admirers are spammers. Scrolling through my blog’s collected spam I see the following:

  • Excellent site, added to favorites!!
  • This is a great site. Not everyone has to agree but I sure do. Can’t wait for some more posts.Keep it real.
  • Best site I see. Thanks.
  • Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)
  • So interesting site, thanks!
  • HI! I love this place!
  • I’m really impressed!
  • Your home page its great
  • Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!
  • I like your site

So if you’ve got a blog, my advice to you is: beware the flatterers.

23 Comments to “Spammers, You Flatter Me

  1. Wanbro says:

    Fishing for complements!? Go on then…

    Great site! Keep up the good work!!!

  2. John says:

    Wanbro,

    Let’s see… Either my plan is working, or you, sir, are a SPAMMER!

  3. Zhuanjia says:

    I’d like to start a trend for unflattering spam. So your site is not very “cognitive” and I don’t think you’ve got much of a future.

  4. Shaun says:

    You seem to have forgotten all your readers that want nothing more than to offer you every prescriptiond drug ever made.

  5. Matt says:

    Wanbro, that hardly adds up to 90 degrees.

  6. pketh says:

    I used to get these a lot too, back in the days when I used movable type. Obviously spam, because no one could like me that much . Always good for a laugh though

  7. John says:

    Zhuanjia,

    I’ll try to be more cognitive in the future.

  8. John says:

    Shaun,

    Yeah, and sometimes they combine the two, as in:

    “I love this site! If you want ______, go to…”

  9. John says:

    pketh,

    Well, I’m using WordPress with Akismet, which is very good at catching spam and rarely marks non-spam as spam. (It thinks zhwj is a spammer, for some reason, though.) Still, I have 100 new spam comments about every 2 days.

  10. ash says:

    Great site!

  11. zhwj says:

    It’s very perceptive, then. I’ve just been establishing a benign reputation so I can come out with “buzz” and other viral marketing spam.

  12. Ryan says:

    Hey John, what’s the point of spam like this? I mean, I get the spam trying to sell me penil enhancement products… but I don’t get the “Great site” spam… is it link spam for higher Google search ratings?

    Since I added the little “type the number/letter” thingy to my comments, I’ve had absolutely no spam.. but I only get a moderate amount of visits…so….

  13. Shaun says:

    Ryan,

    Those “benign” comments usually include a link to a site trying to sell you something. The link isn’t in the comment itself. Click on their name and you’ll end up on their site.

  14. Mike says:

    Super cool site! If you want to see more examples of inane flattery or viagra ads try… http://www.sinosplice.com

  15. ash says:

    Wierd how they still do it – Must just be in the hope somebody clicks the link in the name and then buys a product. no follow tags are used on all new blogs now, so SE will ignore comment spam.

  16. Shaun says:

    It’s probably just a script that somebody runs. Something that crawls blog links and submits random comments automatically. I highly doubt there is somebody actively typing comments into each blog entry. Unless……are there any blog-comment-spamming-sweatshops running China?

  17. I was just going to blog about the exact same thing tonight, but you beat me to it. Now it would look lame if I posted it. Great post!

  18. Zhuanjia says:

    It would be interesting to know if Chinese language blogs get inundated with this kind of “love your site now try this site” comment spam. Presumably it is to build up the spammers Google ranking based on the number of people linking to their site. Does the same mechanism work for Baidu?

  19. Shaun says:

    Comment spamming a blog using a newer version of WordPress is useless in upping your Google rating. WordPress adds rel=”nofollow” to all links in comments. Well behaved spiders like Google’s should ignore those links. Not sure if Baidu’s spider follows the rules.

  20. Matthew says:

    I really like your site, even though I hardly ever comment…

  21. Nilesh says:

    Yeah.. I’m so used to those that I accidentally deleted a legitimate comment on my blog because it said “Exactly what I’m looking for, thanks.” and had a link back to his blog whose url looked suspicious, and my trigger finger hit delete. When I took a look at his site, it was just another developer blog like mine and didn’t even have ads or anything. Now I let my spam filter delete comments it thinks is spam since even I have false positives doing it manually.

  22. Roy says:

    Well, I actually hate the site but love the bikini girls.

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