It says something when you start getting as many as 30 spam comments a day. What it says, I don’t know exactly.
I guess I could take it as a sign of arrival. There are shady companies across the globe that think they can benefit by drawing traffic from my humble site (unlikely as it seems). But with my trusty Akismet Plug-In, their hyperlink gibberish is a minor inconvenience. In fact, it’s kind of fun to scroll through the quarantined comments and, ultimately, obliterate them with a click of ‘Delete Permanently.’
I get five basic categories of spam. About a third are advertisements for pharmaceuticals, especially “male enhancement” drugs like Cialis and Viagra. Twenty percent are porn—99% of it, straight porn—which ticks me off. They couldn’t even take a second to read a little about my site? Another twenty percent is loan and credit offers. Another twenty percent is internet or computer products. And the rest is the most interesting category: miscellaneous.
I’ve been spammed by companies selling kayaks in Australia, sites devoted to vulcanology, a fan site for a pre-teen Beauty Queen, and a project that collects sightings of UFO’s, among others. Some spam comes in written in Russian, Hungarian and Chinese, so I’m not sure what they’re trying to sell, although I can understand enough of the French spam to see that they’re just as concerned about erectile dysfunction as here in the states. The best stuff is poorly, ridiculously translated into English. Here are some of my favorites:
On my review of Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms…
“Good information but might you spoon feed it to me?”
On Writing Prompts…
“I hope you get a nice day! very good article, shaft written plus very outlook out. i am looking forward until reading frequently of your posts within the approaching.”
Many of the messages try to play to my ego, with near-incomprehensible, vague praise, in effect, trying to trick me into releasing them from spam purgatory. It’s tempting, but I won’t compromise my integrity.
I wonder what kind of spam this post will get?
