Publishers: Beware the Comment Spam Monster

As any blog publisher has already discovered, to his eternal sorrow and damnation, there is an entire sub-human class of species known as the Comment Spam Monster that lurks just beyond the reach of your friendly neighborhood spam filter’s best efforts to kill them off. Kill ten and twenty more show up. Kill twenty and now there’s a solid one hundred nipping at your heels. The Comment Spam Monster is the reason only a fool would allow comments to be posted directly to a blog without being approved by a human being first.

From where we sit, as publisher of more than a dozen blogs, the Comment Spam Monster is an annoying presence, though we often find humor in his mostly illiterate posts. Here’s one recent example:

“Kindly check your design and your security, sir/madam. Sorry for commenting your web page, but it will be wiser to check it first. I was checked your web site, there is any error in reading your web site, and there is navigation blur. Firstly, let me introduce myself. I work for checking as many as websites that on the internet. Many web sites has poor security and minimum update, while I checked one of them, you will be surprised that it is critical. Secondly, let talk about different topic. Your website has beautiful topic and you deliver in great order to audience. This technique is so powerful, so let me share in future post, because I am your fans of this topic. With great main topic you deliver to me, it is more important to share with us. Thanks for giving me chance to chat with you. I am pleased to welcome your future opinion.”

First of all, if you, as a publisher, see any kind of well-intentioned sincerity in this comment, you need to get on the Internet and study the topic. Though links were purged, this was an obvious attempt at keyword stuffing and a fishing expedition to get a link back from one of our blogs. If we had recently undergone a complete brain removal, we might have been tempted to approve it. Sorry, Mr. Illegible Sentence Construction, but this was immediately marked as spam. Hopefully the other two hundred blogs you posted it on did the same because, guess what, that’s makes all your effort at dumbing down the world through inflicting nonsensical verbiage on it in vain.

We’d love to spend a day or so picking apart this random collection of letters but that would be a waste of time for all involved. Suffice it to say, in the ever-so-wise words of our commenter – “Sorry for commenting your web page” – believe us when we say, we’re very sorry you “commented” it also. We’re all worse off for for the time you spent “composing” this monstrosity when you really should have been playing Scrabble or investing in a dictionary.

Oh, and thanks for the tip. We’ll be sure to watch out for “navigation blur,” whatever the hell that is.

The Speaking of Wealth Team

Flickr / SOCIALisBETTER