This one is a bit off topic, but we wanted to share it anyway.
We have set the wordpress comments moderation option on this blog so that we get to review/approve all the comments before they are posted. Obviously, we chose this in order to weed out all the spam that gets posted as comments. This setup works fine because currently our comment volume is low. And we get to act on new comments within a couple of hours anyway.
Every day, we find new spam comments. Usually it is the garden-variety spam. The Russian gibberish, the Greek alphabets, and sometimes meaningless sentences like –
Amiable brief and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you on your information.
But occasionally we run into a gem, like this one below, which makes me wonder how creative these spammers are getting. They must be spending a lot of hours thinking up interesting conversations.
My friend and I were recently discussing about how involved with technology our daily lives have become. Reading this post makes me think back to that debate we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.
I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside… I just hope that as the price of memory falls, the possibility of uploading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s a fantasy that I daydream about every once in a while.
(Posted on Nintendo DS running R4 DS BB)
The cool thing is that Akismet did trap this one as spam. The cat and mouse game between spammers and the Akismet algorithm is exciting.
Update from the day after: Today this article got indexed by Google and lo and behold hell broke loose. Seeing their text show up on the blog (since I quoted it verbatim in my article), the spammers have been rushing to us like sharks smelling a drop of blood from miles away. They probably think we approved their comment to be published, and wanted to quickly cash in by adding more comments.
We had 42 spam comments in under 30 minutes. I’m really curious on how this is gonna turn out. Honestly, we were a bit concerned about Google giving us bad karma points for quoting the spammy text, but so far all looks well.