A bit of administrivia: If you drop by this weblog and leave a random-sounding comment on some old entry, chances are I will simply assume you are spamming us and delete the comment and ban you forthwith.
This morning I deleted just such a message. The site linked didn’t seem especially unpleasant (that is, it wasn’t pr0n), but there was no connection at all to the post it commented on and the message itself was brief and generic. Given the proliferation of comment spam, I will err on the side of deleting in cases like this.
We treat non sequiturs as spam
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4 responses to “We treat non sequiturs as spam”
I’ve been noticing those weird comments, too. No links to pr0n or pill pushers, just odd little comments. After hesitating a while, I decided to do what you do–I delete them. I’ve also begun turning off comments on the old entries that seem to be drawing comment spam.
Hm. My first reaction to this post was, “Did I post a strange, incomprehensible comment here recently?”. I don’t think I did, but even so, it brings to mind a question:
Would blog spam be a problem if the contents of the URL field weren’t put into a link tag, but instead displayed in text on the page?
Banned? My comments are always random sounding. One site banned the comment “interesting”. Sometimes that all I can think of to say. As a courtesy I was just letting them know I had read it and was still thinking.
It’s not easy to recognize “spam” is it? I also thought that six Persian blogs that started coming in suddenly were spammers. I couldn’t read their site and they all came in so suddenly. I removed them from the referrer list.
Then I was ashamed when another came in and I saw this glowing dotted box code with Arabic writing inside. The other sites had little html and css tricks we had demonstrated. Now I realize they were simply telling their friends about us and using some copy-and-paste code. I learned a lesson. Yours may be more obvious, this was just my experience and my mistake.
Nice place you have here.
This morning I got one from jesusisreligion dot com. It did relate in a superficial way to the post but still felt like a veiled attempt to get their site linked to. The target wasn’t a commercial site, but ideological. Is that still spam?
I deleted it on the basis that it was still an attempt to game the system.