Help – The Spam Bots are taking over

Like every blog owner, I get a fair amount of comment spam. Site visitors almost never see it, but unfortunately I have to skim it, because occasionally a legitimate comment ends up in the spam bucket.

So I’ve seen a lot of spam. Mostly ads for various types of clothing and fashion items (Karen Millen dresses and Gucci handbags seem to be popular at the moment – last autumn it was Ugg boots and Moncler outdoor clothing), medication (I think you can guess what sort), team jerseys from American sportsmen I have never heard of, porn sites, tooth whitening services, snow removal services, places promising casual sex (How to find casual sex in Liverpool – Uh, just put on a miniskirt, push out your cleavage and walk into a pub? Cause that sure seems to work for the locals.) and the occasional illegal film/TV download site (Dear spam bots, I don’t even like Downton Abbey, so why would I want to download it?). I also get spam bots desperate to discuss the merits of a defunct iTunes competitor called Zune (that’s what you get for letting spam bots do your advertising), people promising to sell me fake passports for a huge laundry list of countries (because I am desperate to own a Somali passport) and lengthy blobs of text in Polish which don’t make any more sense when plugged into Google Translate (it seems to be vaguely religious and mentions the pope). And then there’s the endless parade of monosyllabic Brazilian spam bots which have me close to banning Brazilian visitors altogether, because they comment a hundred times a day.

But today, I found something that was really strange, namely a bunch of spam bots posting as presumably hijacked Facebook accounts having a discussion about the relative merits of various Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez films among themselves in the comments of completely unrelated posts. Yes, they were actually replying to each other and calling each other stupid for liking the wrong films. Any more and they would have invoked Godwin’s Law. For a moment I wondered whether those comments were legit, except that the spelling was horrible, I don’t know why anybody would feel compelled to discuss Tarantino films in a post advertising a new Pegasus Pulp release and besides, there is no way new commenters could have seen each other’s comments before I approved them.

Still, the spam bots are getting smarter.