Flatterspam and anti-spam spam

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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.)

6 thoughts on “Flatterspam and anti-spam spam”

  3. Wow, Heather! I’ve been getting a lot more of that type of drive-by blog-spaming. I’ve also noticed a LARGE number of blog-droppings with URLs ending in .ru (a Russian domain?)

    My goal — to be offensive controversial enough to engender as many comments as P.Z. gets! hahahahaha

  4. Best to go for quality not quantity…..

    We get some great comments here. Some of them are much better than the posts. (I started a list but it was too long and still missed off too many people.)

    This makes me feel sheepish about making lame comments myself. When I’ve read a really good post somewhere but can’t of anything to say except “This post was really good.” Then I think it’ll be taken for flatterspam. So I don’t comment often enough myself.

    PZ’s comments. 🙂 Some of his commenters would have been called “lickspittles” in medieval England. He can post a two-line link to another site and get a couple of hundred comments, while the site he pointed at gets one or two.

    I suspect that his students might think they’ll make sure of a decent grade by commenting. I always expect to see a comment there that says “Will this be on the test?”

  5. Who be PZ?

    Yeah, I get into the same problem with comments. I can’t be clever 24/7, and sometimes all I want to say is “hey, good job, liked it”, and then I’m a flatterspammer. (To be honest, I’d be fine with flatterspam, but I fully acknowledge my patheticness.)

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