Spam is insidious. But it’s fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint. It started with simple “Buy my product” emails. Then it quickly focused into topics like sex and money that more people were more likely to respond to. More recently, it’s gone from just email to include things like comments on blogs. Usually, they’re pretty much the same as the email spam, but I started getting comments on my blog like this:

Hello webmaster I like your post “Progress” so well that I like to ask you whether I should translate into German and linking back. Greetings Engel

Sounds sincere enough, right? Also, kinda flattering. But WordPress allows people to list their own URL when they make comments (which is generally a good thing). This lets readers and other commenters know who each other are. But spammers use it just to get people to click on their sites. A quick google search of “whether I should translate into German and linking back” returned about 196,000 hits. So as elated as I was that Engel enjoyed my blog post, I was a little let down to find that there were 195,999 other posts that he enjoyed just as much.

Fortunately, Akismet detected the spam and automatically blocked it. I only found out because I was curious about what the recent spam had been. Yay, Akismet!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.