Spam comments have changed over the last few months. When I first started the blog the spam comments were essentially heavily laden with links to other spam sites. Either blatant (just lists of links) or thinly disguised (long diatribe of text with links spread throughout). Recently though, there’s been an increase in short comments in which the spam is just a URL link of the submitter. The comments all have the same thing in common – ego-stroking.
They cover the following types,
- Personal ego-stroke: Something like ‘you have really good insight, please keep blogging, I love your posts’.
- Site ego-stroke: Something like ‘I love this site, it’s great, I recommend it to all my friends’.
- Site ego-stroke with question: Often goes ‘I love the site but can’t get my RSS reader to subscribe’.
- Ego-stroke with debate: Something like ‘this sounds really good but can it last until the future?’ (I had one of these today attached to the ’77 trailer post).
I guess some people get suckered in by the ego-stroke and are encouraged to approve the posts where they would normally ignore them. Since my ego is already the size of a small mountain I need no further strokage and so am immune. Or maybe it’s because I’m not as easily fooled. Or maybe my self image is so bad I can’t for a moment believe any of the comments are true. Whatever the reason – they still don’t make it past the spam filter on the site.
Soon we’ll be seeing the following class of spam,
- Pet ego-stroke: I love your cat, you should let them post more often.
- Family ego-stroke: Your [significant other] looks great, you should blog about them more.
- Country ego-stroke: I love the part of the world you live in, please post pictures and talk about it more.
I’ll hold out against those as well I think.
I’ve had a few of these as well and I’m not sure if they’re a bad thing or not. They say something nice about your site which could make other people passing by stop and read the actual blog, and they don’t obviously promote anything. The only downside that I could see is the link in the commenter’s details, but who ever looks at those?
They don’t say anything nice about your site because they’ve read it, they say something nice to socially engineer you to approve their comment. Today I had 17 identical comments, in a row, all on the same post. All of them said something similar to ‘Loved the site’ and all of them linked to a different spam website. Only takes 1 person to come to this site, follow a link and get their computer infected as a result to depress me.