The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

The Akismet spam filter identifies nearly all the spam comments, leaving me little to do beyond simply clicking the Empty Spam button. As a result, spam comments don’t appear on this blog.

I treat trivial comments with links to commercial websites as spam. As it says right on the front page, I don’t get paid much for what I write here, so if somebody’s planning to make money off my writings, I expect a major piece of the action. Fair enough?

And, if it’s your first comment, type something on-point and meaningful. I’ll reject “Neat. How cool was that!” until we know you’ve put some thought into it.

With all that in mind, it seems a shame to discard the more creative spam efforts. Well, “creative” in the sense that somebody thought them up, but if you do a quick search on the exact text you’ll find thousands of identical comments; obviously, they’re not really paying attention. So I delete the dross and save the occasional gem.

This list will grow (slowly, I hope) as spammers and machines become more clever. Perhaps at some point they’ll carry on coherent, relevant conversations and I won’t hold them up for ridicule…

Some spammers try to leave comments in response to this page. None of the efforts are worth noting. Here’s a cute one, with a raunchy Gmail account, a Ukraine IP, and a malware URL:

It is certainly interesting for me to read the post. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything connected to them. I definitely want to read more on this blog soon. By the way, rather nice design your blog has, but how about changing it every few months?

For what it’s worth, I don’t particularly like the theme, either, but Rubric is (IMHO) the least awful of WordPress.com’s flexible-width offerings. Fusion seems somewhat better, although it’s apparently not quite so mobile-device friendly.

Another attempt on this page from a German IP, a throwaway email, and a URL offering a list of online installment loan sources, suggests that Akismet is working fine:

I have not found what I wanted

This one strikes me as both self-evident and self-referential:

Could it be just me or does it give the impression like some of the remarks come across as if they are left by brain dead people?

Once more, with enthusiasm:

Wonderful beat ! I wish to apprentice while you amend your web site, how could i subscribe for a blog site? The account aided me a acceptable deal. I had been tiny bit acquainted of this your broadcast provided bright clear idea

In response to Devil’s Pie for Xubuntu, perhaps in Reverse Polish Notation:

Onload of page my antivirus put alert, check pls.
Zoran

My notes on Xubuntu Multimedia Keyboard Keys attracted spammers for several months. This one had a Chinese dotted-quad IP address, a Russian email address, and a French ISP. The answer to the question is yes, subject to the terms described in the About & Copyright page (which also has a contact form), not that they care.

Hi,
Can i get a one small picture from your site?

That post also attracted my all-time favorite spam comment:

Hi there,
Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.

Thank you
Saurooon

In response to both Finding Transformer Pi Model Parameters and Sunglasses Repair: Half a Hinge Is Better Than None, we see what must be a template for many similar spams:

Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for writing. I’ll definitely be subscribing to your blog.

Somehow, I hope he doesn’t follow through.

Evidently some spammers haven’t mastered their tools. A comment from an IP address that resolves to Kuala Lumpur in response to this very page was succinct:

SX1S7j osutflnascvb,

Then, weeks later, this snippet appeared in response to Experian Triple-Alert Signup: FAIL:

iTZgcv comment3 ,

I suppose they’re getting paid to do that, so you can’t quite call them losers, but you can expect that they’d RTFM on their spam-generation scripts before launching.

You’d also think that the fact no spam ever actually appears in the comments would give ‘em a clue, but noooo…

Broken-template spam comes almost exclusively from US-based broadband ISPs, so it’s likely a poorly-written wad of botnet malware and the actual hardware owners remain blissfully ignorant of what their PCs are up to.

Shortly thereafter, it seems they fixed the template, which produces a message consisting of total gibberish. Apparently that’s automatically posted and, if it appears, then they know nobody’s paying attention to the blog and they take it over. Doesn’t work here.

In response to Arduino Command Line Programming: Avrdude Puzzlement, a comment that started pleasantly, if somewhat oddly phrased, got rugged, then turned weird:

That was a very nice post, I’m proud of you!
hello, your site is lucky.
mature moms naked
<snippage>
Hi this is a very informative site!
Save your time, please.

In response to the picture of corroded capacitors, a batch of incoherent spam that, perhaps, came from a stunningly bad machine translation. [Update: it all seems to come from IP addresses in Luxembourg. Has he/she/it nothing better to do than look at that one picture?] I had to look up the obvious word; this is my runner-up for best spam so far:

You will-power insistence a doctor to fight a prescription and also in behalf of a posologist to then disburse it.

In response to Front Derailleur Cable Breakage: Prevention Thereof, another offer I’m not holding my breath over. This seems to be something of a template, as searching for the first two words will reveal:

punctilious post. simply one unimportant where I quarrel with it. I am emailing you in detail.

Another along the same lines, perhaps from the same party:

Credit you representing details. It helped me in my task

That text appears in many other places, with small variations in the last word. While I’d like to think I was helpful, I’m unwilling to advertise an obvious spam website.

Outright flattery is painfully obvious, particularly when you can find 14,700 instances of the exact same “praise” scattered about the blogosphere. The URL associated with this one was, indeed, a blog, with exactly one cut-and-pasted post on a subject totally unrelated to my topic.

Nice post & nice blog. I love both.

This one almost made sense, but the URL resolved to a click-trap site or something like that based on sports betting which surely wouldn’t benefit from the details of Reversal Zits: SD Card Variations:

Wow! Thank you! I continually needed to write on my blog something like that. Can I implement a part of your post to my website?

This response to the spam-as-industrial-sabotage post comes from a Romanian IP with a Romanian URL (but a junk email address) advertising an ID card printer. I take he thinks I’m doing a good job:

Thanks designed for sharing such a fastidious opinion, article is fastidious, thats why i have read it entirely

Do they really stand around the water cooler discussing how to add screws to the Maximum PCB Platen?

Thanks a lot for giving everyone an extremely terrific possiblity to check tips from this website. It’s usually very great plus full of a good time for me and my office co-workers to visit your website on the least 3 times in a week to learn the new secrets you will have. And indeed, I’m at all times motivated with all the very good techniques served by you. Selected 2 points in this article are unequivocally the most beneficial I’ve ever had.

But not everybody can be so easily satisfied, although this guy has posted the same thing to 70-odd blogs so far. In this case, a Texas IP address and a malware URL coupled with a throwaway Egyptian email:

The subject is fully clear but why does the text lack clarity? But in general your blog is great.

A million hits on this praise-o-matic chunk says this guy won’t be back:

Hey, I found your blog in a new directory of blogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, anyway cool blog, I bookmarked you. :)

The answer to this question seems obvious, at least to me:

IJWTS wow! Why can’t I think of tnihgs like that?

[Update: The single word with transposed letters marks a trend. To judge from the search results, spammers have replaced the total gibberish mentioned earlier with short comments containing a single misspelled word. Perhaps spam filters now reject anything without basic English statistics?]

How about some Parametric English created by template substitution? This example evidently suffered a syntactic error that let the template peek through:

Great post! I did (look|percieve) at it the same way you did.

Too bad about that misspelling; it explains much of the junk.

More template entries show how that works:

I like the valuable info you supply for your articles. I’ll bookmark your weblog and check again here frequently. I’m relatively sure I’ll be informed many new stuff right right here! Good luck for the following!…

I just like the helpful information you provide to your articles. I’ll bookmark your blog and take a look at once more right here regularly. I am quite certain I will be informed many new stuff right right here! Best of luck for the next!…

Once in a while, a genuine dim bulb leaks an entire template:

{{You must|You need to|You have to|You should} {take advantage of|make the most of|benefit from|take full advantage of} {all the|all of the|each of the|every one of the} software advancements that {happen to be|are actually|are|are generally} {a successful|an effective|an excellent|a prosperous} {Internet marketer|Online marketer|Internet entrepreneur|Affiliate marketer}. {If your|In case your|Should your|When your} work {begins to|starts to|actually starts to} suffer, {the competition|your competition|competition|your competitors} could {leave you|make you|create} {in the|within the|inside the|from the} dust. Show {that you are|that you will be|that you are currently|you are} always {on the|around the|in the|about the} {cutting edge|innovative|leading edge|really advanced}, {and they will|and they can} {learn to|learn how to|figure out how to|discover how to} trust {you and your|both you and your|you and the|your} products.

This looks like machine translation at work:

Hello there! You some type of educated? Excellent communication. Can you tell myself the ultimate way to join your website?

My initial reaction? Why, yes. Yes, I am some type of educated and, no, I don’t deal in ultimate ways. Color me snooty, I suppose.

I think a round trips through the thesaurus produced this keyword-saturated attempt:

I discovered your blog website on google and examine numerous of your early posts. Continue to preserve up the superb operate. I merely extra up your RSS feed to my MSN News Reader. In search of forward to reading much more from you later on!

Then we have praise with a Zen paradox built in:

There are times that i dont read more than two lines but i think you can add some value. Cheers!

Direct from a Pakistani IP and a nominally reputable URL, but with a throwaway email address, this gusher in response to the 2010 year-end summary almost made me feel good all over. A few hundred duplicates scattered here & there dilutes the effect just a bit, though:

I have been really glad after reading this blog as the knowledge which has been given via this blog is simply tremendous. I would congratulate and appreciate the blogger for doing this much hard work.

It’s hard to tell whether this is a template or just gibberish:

You’ve got created it actually crystal clear at the same time as simple to check out

What seemed like an on-point response to Inkjet Refilling: Economics of the Empire turned out to have a IP from Thailand, a gmail address, and a bogus web target in the UK. Most of the duplicates around the web were comments on HP OfficeJet 6000 sales pages, so perhaps he (it’s always a he, isn’t it?) is annoyed:

I GOT THIS PRINTER THINKING THAT I COULD SCAN AND PRINT AND ALL BE WIERLES WELL IT WON’T CANECT TO MY HP G60 SO IT’S NOT EVRRY THING I’D HOPED FOR
YOURS TRUELY

A very bored human or a moderately smart ‘bot attempted to create a series of short, irrelevant comments on various posts. Evidently the point was to draw traffic to a gaming site (in Germany, oddly enough), with a few attempts every day from broadband US IPs with bogus emails (from Egypt, most recently). A search for the exact text returns thousands of hits. Here, try some yourself:

Hey, ok, I get it, I guess – but does this really work?

An sich n cooler post, aber kannst beim nächsten mal n bisschen detailierter sein?

I have no reason to believe the spammer speaks either English or (given the grammar problems) German as his milk tongue. Pathetisch, nicht wahr?

An Indian-subcontinent IP address, an irrelevant *.co.uk URL, and an obviously bogus gmail address produced this response to a post on extracting traces from my HP oscilloscope. Oddly, it’s a unique string, so perhaps I’m on the cutting edge of spamdom.

I think this such conversions may cause a large amount of pollution.

Why do I get the feeling this guy remains confused about RF shielding?

Ah, This is exactly what I was looking for! Puts to bed several misnomers I’ve read

One patient spammer at an IP address resolving to what looked like a compromised server spent days posting gibberish consisting entirely of automobile parts lists. The posts had numeric headers consisting of the natural numbers up through about 70, the titles were just the first few parts, and the URLs resolved to a page with essentially the same text. There’s obviously something about this blog spam comment business (and, for sure, it’s a business) that I don’t understand…

A quick response to the first of the GPS + Audio interface posts seemed almost on-point, but … in line with food? It’s from a junk email address with an Indonesian IP:

The amplifiers are vital to give your car audio system that much power is needed. They stimulate an electronic signal by taking the energy of power and modulation of production in line with food. The power that leads to a system is measured in watts RMS only alternative is inaccurate or misleading.

Someone behind a DSL modem in India deployed this puzzling exhortation at one of my notes on Arduino SPI, evidently to attract clicks to one of those baffling sites that must have malware tucked away somewhere. Another single-line comment aimed at the same site in response to the same post confirmed the diagnosis.

The initiative taken for the concern is very serious and need an attention of every one. This is the concern which exists in the society and needs to be eliminated from the society as soon as possible.

Given the number of these comments scattered around the Web, the body count must be getting pretty high. The links are nominally for products designed to enlarge a body part, but which I suspect simply enlarge the botnet count. The IP addresses resolve to various US ISPs.

I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia [link] and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. [link] They’re coming back now. [link] Please send help!

From a spamtrap URL with a throwaway email address and what looks like Yet Another Compromised server, one of several hundred duplicates:

Excuse for that I interfere ?I understand this question. I invite to discussion. Write here or in PM.

A comment from an Israel IP and a US-based *.tv URL has  no relevance to Arduino Mega Coordinates, but does contain what might be the author’s opinion of his readers:

We find out the truth on currency trading software as well as present to the unsuspecting buyer exactly what essentially matter take a peek forex robot reviews

Nah, it’s just a bad translation. Another attempt on the same post from a different Israeli IP with the same *.tv URL, just a few days later:

We uncover the reality regarding foreign exchange robots plus present to the unsuspicious buyer the thing that truly really make a difference take a peek trading forex tested

You wonder: does a human actually check to see if the spam comments get through to the blog they’re trying to corrupt or is the whole thing completely automated? Further evidence suggests it’s all automation, with nobody at the controls.

Along the same lines, comments like this been appearing, one per day, on various posts, from a variety of obviously compromised IPs and throwaway email addresses:

You intend to rate urgent, long-time income, that is not the trail to do it. You be deficient in something that is 100% your own. In a minute you contain your own website (not an account with Blogger, PBase, etc.), you inclination realise the amount of free hand in your hands.

The comments go on like that for pages that come heartbreakingly close to making sense. I initially thought someone was desperately trying to surmount a language barrier, but after a dozen slightly different and equally bizarre repetitions, it’s certainly a spammer saddled with a staggeringly bad machine translator. Or perhaps he round-trips the text through several languages to produce output statistically equal to English prose, but without the burden of having to actually write something intelligent.

This might be the winning entry in that category:

I’m uncommonly to death to I ground this post. Tender thanks you with a view sharing us rigorous info.

Then there’s an inducement to watch something on Youtube:

Hey Guys, inhibit minus this hip funny video haha, it makes you bear like you’re underwater :

You do have to wonder, though, about spammers. After attempting literally hundreds of comments (evidently extolling the merits of porn site, but it’s not like I need a translation to recognize crap) to a single post, none of which get through, you’d think he’d get a clue and go bother someone else. All the posts show up in the Spam bucket and, at this point, once a day I just go click and they’re gone. Worst case, I can just stop paying attention to whatever’s in Spam and let WordPress age it out (which turned out to be a bug I reported: the aging-out process didn’t work).

Of course, it’s just a script… there’s no actual intelligence involved.

From a Brazilian IP with a backlink aimed at a spam blog totally unrelated to my High-Visibility Dremel Chuck Wrench comes this peculiar admission:

My feet has been giving me trouble recently. This blog seems to know what they’re talking about! Thanks!

Glad to be of service, I think.

I think this is an example of being damned by faint praise (from a junk email address, a German URL, and a Swedish IP), but I’m not sure:

Some times its a discomfort inside the ass to read what weblog owners wrote but this internet internet site is genuinely user genial ! .

If praise doesn’t work, perhaps constructive criticism will help. However, IMHO this one from a Romanian IP and a well-done Polish spamtrap URL, doesn’t match my notes on Shower Faucet Handle Tightening. Even with a million identical hits, things aren’t that bad across the web:

Certainly enjoy your internet site however, you have to check the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I find it very troublesome to tell the truth nevertheless I will certainly come back again.

Some appear concerned about the post quality:

Wow! The useless posts here is rampant. How can you keep up with each one of these opinions?

Some even try scathing criticism! From a Latvian IP and a spamtrap URL comes this apostrophe-stripped attempt to add a comment to this very page:

The next time I learn a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one. I imply, I do know it was my option to read, however I truly thought youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you can fix should you werent too busy looking for attention.

However, discovering 200,000 identical comments across the blogosphere blunted any effect on my ego. Not to mention that the same comment appears nearly every week, attached to one post after another, so it’s just random text.

Perhaps I don’t know as much as I thought about UV LED Self-Fluorescence, to judge by this comment from somewhere with a critical apostrophe shortage:

What I wouldnt give to have a debate with you about this. You just say so many things that come from nowhere that Im fairly sure Id have a fair shot. Your blog is terrific visually, I mean people wont be bored. But others who can see past the videos and the layout wont be so impressed with your generic understanding of this subject.

Videos? I have videos on my blog? Why haven’t I been informed of this?

Here’s another attempt to win hearts and minds through dialectic. In this case, a response to my description of the Opossum in the Attic shows I had never considered it in this context:

Good luck getting people behind this one. Though you make some VERY fascinating points, youre going to have to do more than bring up a few things that may be different than what weve already heard. What are trying to say here? What do you want us to think? It seems like you cant really get behind a unique thought. Anyway, thats just my opinion.

Again, however, a million identical hits shows a script at work. It also shows most blogs and forums don’t have moderated comments, alas.

From someone channeling Yoda, this one to Sources in response then comes:

First-class info it is surely. My mother has been seeking for this knowledge.

Perhaps teaching her on her own to search would a nice touch be?

And, what with having nothing to do with coil springs, it’s best if the signal is stopped:

You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side effect , people can take a signal.

They now want to join me. I wonder what would happen if I gave this “student” write access to the comments?

I recognize there is definitely an excellent deal of spam on this blog. Do you want assist cleansing them up? I might assist in between classes!

One even suggested a business plan:

Exceptional advice included in posts could make way up for top e-book

I love spam with internal contradictions, as with this effort for the ever-popular Hot Box Disinsector:

I was wondering if you ever considered changing the layout of your website?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two images.
Maybe you could space it out better?

If I had more content, this would be a full-time job… and an image or two certainly counts for something!

And this must very deep, because I can’t see the bottom from here:

No matter if some one searches for his vital thing, thus he/she desires to be available that in detail, thus that thing is maintained over here.

It seems Nostradamus has taken up spamming:

How will its repugnance delightful a hideous disproportion?
The research prevents? The non-urban referendum sections a surprised question.
The ruin impresses the inquiring supporter towards
an allowance. The skin mole physical objects around an average.