Thursday January 7th, 2010

The exercise:

Almost caught up! I'd keep going but I have other things to work on tonight (hurray for not getting Greg in the first round again!).

AFC Word Count: 6,993
AFC Word Target: 7,000

Your prompt today: spam.

Yes, spam. Allow me to explain...

Mine:

Spammers are stupid.

I'm sure that's not earth-shattering news to any of you but I needed to say it today.

Last night, as I was cruising through the archives in my attempt to label all of my old posts, I had a sudden urge to find the most recent post that had no comments. I was finding it pretty cool to be moving from the oldest posts, which regularly would go a week or two without any comments, to the most recent ones that had at least one comment every day for a very big chunk of time. While I was scrolling down my post list one caught my eye.

Because it had 109 comments.

Um, what?

So I clicked on it. Turns out? It appeared as though some idiot had posted a single comment per day since the post had first gone up (or shortly afterward, for me to have missed it at the time). I'd love to know what was being spammed, but it was all in kanji aside from the odd email address.

And I'd love to know how they thought that was going to ever be seen, as it continued to be buried further and further into the archives. I'm hoping it was just a script that was adding one comment per day automatically, and not some moron going back to that same post every single day and doing it manually.

I spent quite a bit of time deleting the 103 spam comments (individually - thanks Blogger) because I couldn't stand having them there. I'll be keeping an eye on that post to see if the streak has been broken or if the spam continues. I've gotten pretty good at hunting down and deleting spam on Protagonize, so it's not a big deal to carry that practice over to here.

But I still think spammers are stupid.

4 comments:

Glorya said...

Spam Sandwich

In the AM,
Insomniaddiction
And eyes dried
On the computer screen:
Earn you way thru school!
Fw: Sexxy1
Delete.
To infinity.


P.S. You thinking of your Round One entry yet? [nudge/wink] :)

Greg said...

Hah, great post! I shall wait six weeks until you've forgotten about this, pick an old post and add one comment per day to see if I can beat the current record of 109 comments :)
Oh, and you never told us -- how long ago was the most recent post with no comments?

@Glorya: I really like your poem; the first time I read it my eye was caught by the second line (great portmanteau word, btw) so I had to go back and re-read it again (and again), and it got better each time :)

Spam

Unsolicited [Solicitors! We have solicitors who'll solicit night and day, wherever and whoever you are! Call 1-800-HOT-LAYR] email is such a thing of the Nineties [Hot ninety-year olds in YOUR area want YOU now! They're gagging on^H^Hfor it!]. The trend of the Noughties [We sell binary numerals for all occasions, including funerals, church rededication services and garden parties of fifteen people or fewer] is to have targetted [Used archery targets for sale! Fully washable!] advertising embedded within email messages and forum posts [Fence posts!!! We have hundreds of black-market job openings for you!]. It's amazing how much income you can generate simply by selling a little bit of space here and there! [Error, cannot embed spam within spam (yet). Contact your system administrator]

morganna said...

Sorry, spam just didn't do anything for me. So ...
Little glass fish, where
Do you go?
Swimming along,
Swimming to
Nowhere -- where do
You go?

The glass fish picture is here: http://lizbethsgarden.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/glass-fish/

Marc said...

GloryArchi - haha, nicely done! And... I have a first draft done. I'll be poking and prodding at it until I'm satisfied enough to enter it.

Greg - I thought you'd see that as a challenge :P

I had to go all the way back to July 5th of last year. I was quite pleasantly surprised by that. I suspect you had a lot to do with that :)

Yours was awesome, by the way. Particularly the 'yet' in the second to last line.

Morganna - no worries at all, as always. And you pose a very good question indeed :)