The Politest Spammer Ever
Posted by Stropp on August 17, 2007I was just going through my Akismet spam checking for false positives when I came across this little beauty.
hello , you have a very nice site, but Im hired to leave advertising comments on sites, sorry i hate to do it but i have to . If you dont like advertising comments please send me an email with your site address to tedirectory(at)yahoo(dot)com and I will not write on your site. Sorry for inconvenience.
Needless to say I’m not going to respond. After all you know what happens when you do let them know you’re alive. But I have to admit this is the first time I’ve encountered a spammer who has apologised in advance of leaving spam. Full marks for effort.
There’s no need for me to respond either. Only a tiny amount of comment spam ever leaks through Akismet, and it always seems to get held in the moderation queue. Up to now Akismet has blocked over 16000 spam comments. And what does get through is deleted within a few hours.
So Mr. Spammer, if you’re reading this, here’s my answer to your query. I don’t like spam, and I don’t want you to leave it on my site. But even if you do, know that you are wasting your time because it will be stopped by Akismet. BTW, I suggest getting a job where you don’t have to annoy countless thousands of people.
Popularity: 13%
Did the guy leave and ad for something, a link to somewhere. It looks to me like he just apologized for leaving advertising but them didn’t leave any advertising.
Hi Matt, thanks for your comment.
I’m not sure if the guy did end up spamming or not. There’s simply too much spam to examine closely. Akismet catches on average 48 spam comments each day and puts them in a queue. I check the queue to see if there are any false positives and if there are, I despam those. I usually just quickly scan through the list to see if anything stands out.
So even if he did spam afterwards, it has been caught and has been deleted. You wouldn’t have seen it.
In any case, most of the spam I get is absolutely nonsensical. There’s no way anyone would buy anything from it. Some of the spam doesn’t even have any links. What they are doing here (I suspect) is redirecting the heading link to a website to increase their search engine ranking.
Spammers account for one in every two comment attempts on my site. Mostly the dreaded gold sellers…
I would appreciate a reciprocal link to my wow blog if you like it!
wow blog
Thanks
Sam
Hi Sam,
I wish it were the dreaded gold sellers. I get all sorts, but mostly pharmacy and pr*n. Some of the vilest stuff too.
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