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What Have I Done To Make You Think So Little Of Me?

Jul 6, 2009
By .
Movies

About half our comment spam is premised on the notion that one of us — either me or you, Gentle Reader — is both impotent and hung like a gnat, and desirous of changing those circumstances through pharmaceuticals purchased over the internet from people pathologically incapable of spelling.

Increasingly, the other half of our spam is framed as praise of our writing: "Well said, good point!" "I am subscribing to your RSS feed!" "This is very well put!" "Great blog", and so on, with the putative comment author's link serving the marketing function. This half of our spam presumes that I am a narcissistic dolt.

I think I'm substantially more offended by the second group. But then, I am turning 40.

Last 5 posts by Ken

8 Comments
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8 Comments

  1. KainTheGreat  •  Jul 6, 2009 @7:36 am

    Well said, good point!

  2. Reuven  •  Jul 6, 2009 @7:42 am

    I'm not sure that blogspam is effective either. Most of it, I presume, is done by folks who bought into some "internet riches" get-rich-quick scheme and are trying to market their affiliate code. So the authors of a few money-making scams don't care if the Internet suffers collateral damage.

  3. Danimal  •  Jul 6, 2009 @10:27 am

    Once again I am proud to straddle the fence. I really enjoy your posts here, and am endowed with man-parts the size of a grain of rice.

  4. Danimal  •  Jul 6, 2009 @10:28 am

    And yes, I really do wish that my picture didn't appear along side that comment!

  5. Chris  •  Jul 6, 2009 @12:16 pm

    @Reuven – It isn't effective with a properly configured blog (like Popehat). There's a directive automatically added to links in comments that tell search engines to ignore them for ranking purposes.

  6. Patrick  •  Jul 6, 2009 @2:29 pm

    Personally I'm not a fan of the nofollow tag. We like to see our commenters who have sites getting whatever authority we grant without the nofollow tag.

    We keep undesirables out through several other means.

  7. Jack  •  Jul 6, 2009 @7:42 pm

    I despise this blog. Probably because I am so well endowed. And virile.

  8. Chris  •  Jul 7, 2009 @7:44 am

    nofollow's currently on for the "website" link. I haven't tried linking inline recently.