T w e n t y S i d e d
Spam is an effort to communicate with people who don’t want to hear what you have to say. By this definition, every conversation I have with a stranger counts as spam.
Long before we had “get cheat v1agra online no procripshin” there was, “Man, how about this weather lately?”
Here is what the spammers had to say this week:
data recovery in penang:
When some one searches for his necessary thing, therefore he/she wishes to be
available that in detail, therefore that thing is maintained over here.
“Boss, the hard drive failed on our accounting computer and we don’t have a backup. But don’t worry, Kevin is reading some gaming blogs, seeing if anyone in the comments knows of a good data recovery service.”
escoba electrica:
Right here is the right webpage for anybody who
wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much
its almost tough to argue with you (not that I personally will need to…HaHa).
You definitely put a brand new spin on a
topic which has been discussed for years. Great stuff, just
excellent!
The only curious thing about this one is that the payload URL is chicagotribune.com, except with a typo in it. I can’t imagine what the spammers are trying to accomplish. Is this a phishing scam to… steal user accounts at Chicago Tribune.com? Or something?
Escort dudley
Normally I don't read post on blogs, but I would like to say that this write-up very compelled me to try and do it!
Your writing style has been surprised me. Thanks, very nice article.
You… you don’t read blogs, but reading this blog convinced you to try to read this blog?
Damn it, spam bots. Stop creating paradoxes in the comments.
[URL instead of a name]:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on cheap clothing stores online.Regards
This is just lazy. At least try to make your spam look like a comment from a person.
cheap nfl jerseys:
How to get cheap jerseys free shipping? Tips you may used.
cheap nfl jerseys
While the spam message is lazy, this particular spam actually makes some kind of sense. It’s always baffling when you’re getting spam for used tires in Perth and it’s like, “How effective can this be? Haven’t these idiots heard of Craigslist?”
But if you’re selling bootleg NFL jerseys then I can see how you’d need to spam your way into the search results. You can’t just buy advertising space like a legit company, since that’s just going to leave a breadcrumb trail for the NFL lawyers to follow.
Ingrid
What's up Dear, are you truly visiting this web page daily,
if so afterward you will definitely obtain pleasant knowledge.
The funny thing about Ingrid here is that this spam’s payload is for antique furniture buyers. Again, you can just buy and sell antiques. You don’t need to spam the world.
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That spambot sounds like a grandma trying to use the modern lingo to talk to her grandchild…..and considering it was trying to sell antiques, that might not be that far from the truth.
Yeah, that actually sounds like the spambot was programmed with snippets from actual antique store websites or something. I’m assuming a lot here, because I don’t care about physical posessions much less antiques; Antique websites are presumably targeting older people, and hipsters?
The “proper” antique business is actually seriously crashing at the moment, and it’s the hipsters’ fault. You see, actual trained antique dealers want to sell top-quality antiques with a full providence; stuff that is a few hundred years old but still looks like it’s in mint condition, preferably from a known designer or manufacturer. Hipsters want stuff that looks like it’s old and in bad condition, and they don’t really care about the providence of the stuff, just its appearance; the trained antique dealers consider this to be blasphemy. It’s actually easier and cheaper to make reproduction furniture and snot it into hipster-friendly condition than it is to deal in genuine antiques.
Indeed, I got the sense she was encouraging me to visit this site daily, so as to “obtain pleasant knowledge”.
Of particular note is this spambot has better spelling than most people, since it spelled ‘definitely’ correctly.
Ingrid is trying to get in touch with someone whose contact details she has lost, but she remembers that they read this site.
I imagined a backstory for Ingrid where she’s an older woman who runs an antique store in a small town with her husband George. Their marriage has stayed strong through some tough times over the years, but now that their son has left for college they’re both feeling a bit bored.
With nothing better to do, George has recently started playing some of their son’s old video games. While he’s never had much interest in those silly things before, he’s now begun to find them surprisingly engaging. He’s also been surprised to find that there are entire pages on the “interwebs” dedicated to video games. He even managed to find one run by someone he can relate to, a slightly cranky middle aged man with a variety of nagging health problems.
At first Ingrid was happy that George had managed to find a new hobby, but as he spends more and more time on that darn computer she’s begun to feel a bit lonely and neglected. And quite frankly she’d prefer he spend a little more time minding their store. She’s never been too comfortable using the computer (her son usually helps her with “the Netflix”), but she’s decided to give it go and reconnect with George by leaving a message on his favorite website.
So where do I sign up for your spam fanfic newsletter?
“What’s up Dear” is the funniest one so far.
You’re wrong, this isn’t a spambot. This is a spambot programmer. He’s just been doing it for so long he can’t help himself. Like a sportscaster who’s just retired…
“Hi, Bob, that’s a nice new car you have to get back out there on the field with only six seconds left on the clock.”
I was thinking a similar thing. Mostly that the one comment Shamus calls out as not even trying actually sounds like (well, reads like) an actual human comment.
Maybe Shamus had been reading spam for so long he can no longer cheap clothing stores online from one reality to the other.
>> “This is just lazy.”
Says the guy harvesting spam for blog content now. :P
Way back when I had a blog I posted about my first spam comment as a one-off joke, taking it as a sign that I must be moving up in the world if someone cared enough to spam me. But it never occurred to me that I could make a semi-regular feature out of it. This is why you make the big blogging bucks, Shamus.
Its not a typo,its the newspaper of the chicagot.Havent you heard about the beautiful city of chicagot?
To be fair, Chicagot is a horrifying city of snail-men, so Shamus has probably just repressed his memories of the place.
No no. You’re thinking of Escargot.
No, no, that’s a portable game where you try to raise a virtual pet, you’re thinking of Godot.
Thats a type of smelly cheese,you are thinking of nilbog.
Nah, that’s that marsh south of the Nile. You’re thinking of Yggdrasil.
De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.
The world is divided into chicagos and chicagots.
Chicastop?
This sort of reminds me of the first paragraph of a J. Peterman catalog description. Yes, it’s actually a real thing and not something Seinfeld made up.
Example.
OH MY GOD, their product photos are all paintings instead of photos. And not just photos put through a “painting” filter either: actual paintings.
Combined with the text and the clothing styles on display It’s like something straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. I literally cannot tell how much of it is sincere and how much is tongue in cheek.
It’s awesome, and hilarious, and yet I would never buy from them.
A “Portugese Freedom Fighter Shirt” and yet the story is about a Czech character played by an Austrian actor who wore something completely different. Elaine must have had trouble meeting her deadline that week.
Escoba Electrica sounds like she’s trying to do spoken word poetry or something.
I think it is more about link building than getting people to click on the links.
Spammer thinking: if it takes little effort to get a little return, then why not scale up the production?
The potential problem with overproduction is that you’re more likely to get noticed and classified as a link spammer, and so are potentially more likely to get punished by search engines that try to discourage link spam.
Flooding the world with low-quality links that can clearly be tied together isn’t necessarily a “more is better” situation.
Which search engines are that?Because this spam tactics has worked for ages.
Google for one has a policy against letting spammers skew its ranking.
While they don’t as a matter of policy publish details of how exactly the detect and penalize spam, this behavior is exactly the kind of thing they are widely believed to punish.
I don’t deal with this stuff enough day-to-day to know how effective such measures are in practice, but in theory going for volume with low-quality links can be counterproductive.
Spamming is anti-inductive. If you punish people heavily enough for spamming to be anti-effective, effective spammers will link to their competitors.
That only works if you have sufficiently few competitors that you can effectively force “everyone else” down. If you’re GM or American Airlines, maybe that’s viable.
But if you’re a small anonymous storefront selling black market v!agara, you have way too many competitors to try and push them all down. And you also are probably so small you wouldn’t get to the first page of the search results even if you could.
You’ve hit a renewable source of content here. Good work on harnessing this crisitunity.
Also, the first one about “searching for his necessary thing” is all “if you know what I mean”.
“Thanks for sharing your thoughts on cheap clothing stores online.
Regards”
Shamus, I thought this was a gaming blog, but now I hear you’re writing about cheap online clothing stores? That’s some serious diversity!
He’s also been writing about food substances too. Mostly Spam meat food product, but IIRC there was something about internet “cookies” at one point.
And also, we must not forget that “what do they eat?” has come up a time or two when talking about certain video games.
This is a food blog, isn’t it?
Nahh, it could be one of his guest writers but Shamus, can you link me to the best cheap clothing stores because this blog is obviously about clothing and fashion (actually have you ever written about clothing in games? Maybe that’s the link to this? I’m stretching probably though).
That one from escort dudley about not normally reading posts on blogs I’m imagining as being a template of the form of “Normally I don't [X], but I would like to say that this write-up very compelled me to try and do it!” where X can be a lot of strings, and someone slipped in “read posts on blogs” as a joke.
That, or it generates X based on content, which makes me hope you’ll eventually see something like “Normally I don't fight Reapers in the galaxy, but I would like to say that this write-up very compelled me to try and do it!”
“Normally I don’t cheap clothing stores but this is my favorite cheap clothing store on the Citadel.”
“Normally I don’t eat but this post has compelled me to wonder why.”
You know, at this point, I can’t help but wonder how much of the spam is just us commentors trying to get our 15 seconds of fame.
Get cheap 15 seconds of fame online stores now!
Was just thinking: if you needed a fresh kind of filler, going through analytics / server logs and picking out weird phrases people have typed into search engines to find your site can be amusing.