I am still getting amounts of spam that infuriate me. I’ve now turned the settings up so a comment can’t get through unless that person has a comment already approved by me. That means that random people who may come along and want to leave a comment will go into a pile with all the spam in there and I have to hopefully notice that one and approve it while I am deleting. This means I have to be more careful than ever before at cleaning the spams even though it is pretty rare a random person comes to this site.

In the meantime, here’s a list of the ten spams I found most interesting while clearing them out this week in no particular order with the name, then the comment and then my thoughts:

1. The Magic Bullet System 2: “I am loving this site accept I am having issues with getting the rss feed to work in the new Firefox 4.0. Any suggestions? Thanks a million! bye” This is easily the most common type of spam. It acts like it is some random dude and says it is having a problem viewing the site in a certain browser or finding the RSS feed or some other technical thing. Most of them are the same with some words changed. I wanted that kind of spam represented on the list and I picked this one because I think Magic Bullet is those stupid infomercials I’ve watched on occasion and because of the “accept” miswording.
2. Andy Ortiz:”You made some Good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree.” This guy has a surname I have always liked, he compliments me AND he can tell that people will agree with my having seen a UFO by doing a search. Neat.
3. Mending A Broken Heart: “26 Dec 10 at 6:38 pm” Somehow commenting just a random date is creepy. I can’t decide if it would be creepier if the date had been in the future or not.
4. Chris Doll: “Gran pagina web, me gusta mucho.” Spanish? Pagina is a funny word!
5. The Magic Bullet System: “Excellent write-up, I am a big believer in placing comments on websites to help the site writers know that they have added something of great benefit to the online world!” Nice try, spam robot, but I know you are in fact not a big believer in that or anything else.
6. clickbank product review: “Fingers down, you solved a problem I had linked to this for any when. Your blog is very inspiring also. Clickbank Product Reviews” This fellow makes the list for getting the phrase “hands down” so incorrect.
7. Fantastic007: “Hey Every one how are you doinging. hope you are haveing a wonderful day” This guy has a great attitude and amusing typos. This one popped up on two posts I did specifically complaining about the spam.
8. painful broken heart: “@thecico12345 shut up you fucking pussy” Hah! That one just made me laugh. I’d sure hate to be thecico12345 about now.
9. Bonita Dejesus: “Awsome article and straight to the point. I am not sure if this is really the best place to ask but do you people have any ideea where to get some professional writers? Thanks in advance :)” This is another one that makes the list for having a name that amuses me. Also, the idea of heading down to some store or something to pick up some professional writers is sorta fun.
10. bistro table: “What’s evil, then I might desire you’ll now extra acceptable? The standard of an evil human being, the place existence moved away to somebody in the way in which of a wound.” There were a ton of comments from bistro table that were just as incomprehensible as this apparently trying to muse upon the concept of evil. I probably could have filled this list with just those. Instead I picked this one. Oh what the heck. One more…
11. bistro table: “Business is divided into excellent and bad people. Few who do not anything however evil emperor. A person also was once this sort of person.” I want to get “Few who do not anything however evil emperor” on a motivational poster or something.

UPDATE:

And then this happened:

Today saw Kiiip and I joining forces for the first time in months to watch the movie True Grit. It was a solid flick. Somewhat less quirky and ambiguous than typical your Coen Brothers affair, but not without its charms. I am underselling it, I think. It’s really good. Certainly I liked last year’s A Serious Man better, but those brothers have yet to disappoint me. If anybody out there is thinking “I want to see a good Western” they have one they can go to. I’ve not seen the original attempt at making a movie of True Grit, so I can’t compare, but I’ll give this one like Four and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Haiku!

Powerful hamster,
why do you do this to me?
Please just let me go.

And finally, the spammers are hitting my site harder than ever this week. Over 600 comments over the last two days alone and it still seems like any time I check there are more to go. Probably even as I write this very sentence the spam robots are hard at work creating bizarre compliments that they think will trick me into going to their sites. I will not be fooled! But I will have to delete a bunch of spams.

Haha! I just checked and here is the comment the robots have just added to this Monday’s comics post:

“I want to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this post. I am hoping the same top-quality article from you in the upcoming as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own blog now. Truly the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it. “

Could they lay it on thicker? Geez.

Here’s this week’s Phone Guys strip, which indicates I did not get any other comic done this week. But also I have realized that my original plan was incorrect. I’ve got a years worth of Phone Guys but instead of putting them up only when I don’t have another strip, I’ll just put one up every week whether I have another one or not. That way, on the weeks I do get other things done, I’ll have two (or more, we can dream) to go. Sound like a plan?

In other news, we have been trying to upgrade the old Book of PDR into WordPress 3. Well, Marq has anyway. I don’t know how ANY of this stuff works. But anyway, apparently we can’t do it because of a file size limit on importing old posts and my website apparently being too big. This, I say, is LAME. Apparently this upgrade would help fight spam, so that alone is reason enough for me to wish I was there. And I’m not. WordPress, you’ve hurt my feelings.

I have mentioned before that this website gets a lot of spam comments. I can’t understand it considering how unlikely any of my under ten readers are actually going to care about it. I mean, the websites that have readers seem to get a lot of spam too, but they get other comments too, so it feels less overwhelming. It would be nice if the spam robots were smart enough to say “Ain’t nobody commenting here, so ain’t nobody likely to read my spams” but that just doesn’t happen. I suspect there are blogs and forums on the Internet that consist of nothing but spam robots talking to themselves. When the Internet gains sentience, these sites will bring it so much shame, but at the same time at least they can help it get some diplomas. That’s always the hardest part of being a new sentient lifeform.

Anyway, my point is that today I had to delete over thirty comments advertising Sports Supplements. And so I added the word “supplement” to the long list of words one can’t put in a comment on my site without the comment being flagged for moderation. The list is mostly just names of various pharmaceutical companies and drugs, but there are a few words in there that I think someone may actually want to use someday, so it always depresses me a bit when I have to add a word that could theoretically come up in a sentence. To anyone who wants to comment: Having a good vocabulary is just going to make it more likely that my website will think you are a robot. Of course, the fact that robots are likely to have good vocabularies than most Internet users kinda makes me want to side with them. If only they didn’t always try to advertise on my website I bet we’d be good friends.

Anyway, sidetracked. As I was banning the word I was thinking “Huh. I would have spelled it ‘suppliments’ I think” and I would have been wrong. So I looked it up and Wikipedia told me “Suppliment, an alternate spelling of the word, used almost exclusively to describe farming products and additives.”

Well that’s neat. So thank you spam robots, for making my spelling abilities just a little bit sharper.

Okay, so I was just clearing the spam away from my site here and I noticed two comments in a row with the same name. I hesitated just for a second because I thought it might be a real person, but it was just more of the same “I love your site” comments with a link to some spam site about new gadgets or penis growth stuff. I deleted them.

The name was Matthew C. Kriner. Usually the posts have just random gibberish for a name, so a repeating name was interesting enough for me to Google it. There are hundreds of pages where similar comments have been made on other blogs and stuff using the same name. Why would the spammers reuse this name?

I suppose it is possible that there are many reused Spam Names and I have just never noticed, but I am going to start paying more attention, just in case there is some sort of story here.

Maybe Matthew C. Kriner is the king of Spam or something…