Another Article About Spam

The other day, I briefly noticed that there were a lot of spam comments. Normally, I delete these on the regular, but I must have just forgotten lately. Not that it’s a huge problem, I’m the only person who ever sees spam comments. And it’s very easy to get rid of spam as well. All I have to do is click a button, and all those spam messages disappear.

What does surprise me though is just how much there is.

Seriously, there can be thousands of spam messages if I forget to empty the spam bin. I’m pretty sure that all of these spam comments are made by the same sorts of people.

Pretty much every comment works in the same way. A generic sentence, often a question, from a fake email account, with a link to whatever products they are trying to flog. It’s all spam that gets caught instantly, but I can’t help but wander about why they think they’ll ever get any hits. Occasionally, there’s an attempt at faking a real comment, but most of them are unimaginative. They exist solely as a bunch of keywords, put in the form of a question. One that they basically answer immediately with a link to whatever it is they are asking about.

I suppose it just takes one click to make it all worthwhile, but even then, that’s a huge amount of work for pretty much no reward.

Weirdly random messages.

However, while most of these spam comments are the same, the things they try to flog vary greatly. Currently, the biggest spammers are trying to sell things to do with lingerie or sex toys for women, something I assume that our mostly male audience particularly appreciate. And by ‘mostly’, I mean that the vast majority of spam comments are pretending to ask about lingerie. Really, I shouldn’t be surprised, since a lot of our traffic comes from aabicus’s series of nude mods for various games. But, like, why would anyone, regardless of gender, libido and all that, want to buy sexy things off a shitty, sketchy website?

Other big spammers are people trying to sell ‘proxies’. I have no idea what they are actually selling, and I am not going to click on weird links to find out. But at least there’s some effort in the proxy-selling spam. The majority of these scammers pretend to have some actual interest in the random articles they comment on. It’s still obviously spam though.

I suppose I should be glad that all the weird, cult-like religious stuff no longer appears in the spam box. Because those comments were just fucking retarded.

“Why not just turn off comments?”

Honestly, I’ve considered that. I’ve considered it a lot, since we actually get very few genuine comments on our articles. To be fair, there are over 3000 articles here, so commenting is spread rather thinly. But we do occasionally get genuine comments. As in, actual people look at our articles and leave their own comments on them.

While genuine comments are rare, it seems a shame to turn them off completely. Not everyone wants to leave comments on our social media pages. Heck, not even I bother with commenting on Facebook links or anything like that. It’s just nicer to keep comments all in one place, at the bottom of an article. Since all the spam-killing is done automatically, and new comments have to be manually approved, I’m fine with all these idiots screaming into an empty nothingness.