OK, I’m a sucker for flattery. I even admit to keeping a constantly-updated and re-ranked mental roll call of compliments that strangers pay me in the street. (The more ludicrously undeserved the better, of course. I am talking about flattery, here, not objective observation. )

But, hey, I’m not totally stupid. Accepting flattery from comment-spam is a step too far even for me. In the past few days there’s been a surge in “comments” like these:

Hello webmaster. Great job!

(Well, thanks.)

http://www.whydontyou.org.uk – great domain name for blog like this!

(We like to think so, but to be honest it doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of domain names.)

You are a very smart person!

(They know me so well.)

I loved Why Dont You Blog?!

(I am so pleased that you liked it.)

Hi. Why Dont You Blog? was very well written.

(Where are the bloody exclamation marks? I think you may be almost damning the blog with faint praise, if you can’t even come up with a few exclamation marks.)

Why Dont You Blog? was a perfect blog in the world of insurance agents las vegas

(Bah, you had me right up until the “insurance agents las vegas” thing.)

Step one in successfully getting what you want through flattery is surely to at least pretend to be sincere. So, a bit of a FAIL there for mr colondetox (although your site name is probably a good indication of the quality of its content) and your many brothers-in-spam.

In fact we generously even let through the spams that seem to have come from a factory full of impoverished urchins doomed to write contextually apposite comments for dollars. At least they’ve made the effort to write about the post. (Though the links get stripped……)

But the “You’re on our spammers list but we’ll take you off if you just respond by clicking on this link” approach is really cunning.

It’ has a long list of apparent spamblogs and it says:

Are you moderator of this site? Please send email to *****.com with your site name and we remove it from our base;)

I’ll take that as “All your bases..” (I do like the wink. It’s as if they are undercutting the absurdity of the whole idea that you could respond to spam in order to get rid of it.)