For non-bloggers: A look behind the curtain

Lessons in spam: How [not] to Sound Like A Person:

I had been questioning occasion you ever considered altering customized for specific cultures of the website? Its really correctly created; I adore what youve obtained to say. But possibly it is possible to small a lot more when it comes to content so males could interact with it greater. Youve obtained a terrible total lots of text for only finding a single or two images. Maybe you’ll manage to area it out greater?

We all get robo-spam, those announcements of the latest ‘enhancement’ drugs or miracle weight loss systems. For every one that gets through, 100 others are probably kept out of your inbox by a blocker.

Same with blogs – Aksimet on WordPress does a fine job for
Whatever Works. (It’s blocked almost 14,000 spam comments from making it through, but does hold them for review, just in case.)

Robo spammers (see above) have been working at creating auto generated and specific ‘comments’ based on the content of a post. Sometimes they’re even successful, but not often. Sheer awfulness still reigns supreme. It’s a Beta world so far.

But that could change. I notice lately that the language is a bit sharper, the comment itself more relevant, almost believable.

The goal for now is commercial, to encourage a blogger to click through. Which means of course that the goal is to deceive.

I do wonder about future implications for us all when deception is run by software, is automated, targeted and widespread.

Comment spam anyone?

I’ve got a mailbox full of comments on a single post – all one sentence, all look legitimate. But they’re spam. Started last night – I also had dozens in my spam filter at wordpress which I deleted, but these made it through – and they’re still coming.

Anyone else experiencing this?

UPDATE: Via Emma and Auntbethany, I find that I’m on WordPress’ Front Page today. Or this hour. Or these ten minutes. It’s definitely cool though a fleeting honor. That probably explains the onslaught of comments, so perhaps it’s temporary. But then, it appears a dozen or so have subscribed here. If it doesn’t slow down I’ll have to contact my blog host. Tootin’ my own horn here; someone’s got to do it.

UPDATE 2: Dear Elvis! There are 142 comments waiting in my spam filter at this moment. I’m headed off shortly – I almost dread what I’ll return to. Have a feeling I’ll definitely be contacting WordPress today.