Compliments Lost in Translation

I post­ed a bit about the spam on this site before.  It’s not like I have that many read­ers, but as far as I can tell, it’s worth a lot of Google Kudos ™ to get your site linked by oth­er sites.  The spam all con­tain com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed links … unre­lat­ed to their con­tent, unre­lat­ed to my con­tent … com­plete­ly non-sequitur.

Where am I going with this today?  Well… it strikes me that while I have talked about the fact that no com­ments are post­ed to arti­cles until I have approved at least one com­ment from a par­tic­u­lar com­ment poster.  Even though the hope­ful SPAM posters (I’m some­what con­vinced that at least some of them are human) seem to post com­ments with­out regard to this and even though, of them, the anti-spam plu­g­ins on my site seem to elim­i­nate about 99% of them, in SPAM, like a horny teen-aged boy, hope springs eter­nal.  That metaphor could have been worse… real­ly.

Any­ways, I think the chief method by which they hope that I approve their com­ment is flat­tery, but they don’t get it quite right.  I’ve read quite a few of these as they go by, and they gen­er­al­ly don’t scan, but this one in par­tic­u­lar I feel like sin­gling out for ridicule:

Its such as you read my mind! You appear to grasp a lot approx­i­mate­ly this, like you wrote the ebook in it or some­thing. I believe that you sim­ply can do with a few per­cent to dri­ve the mes­sage house a bit, but instead of that, that is fan­tas­tic blog. A great read. I’ll cer­tain­ly be back.

There are a few sim­i­lar­i­ties worth not­ing.  They almost all talk about think­ing alike.  Creepy, real­ly.  The sec­ond sen­tence, “You appear to grasp a lot approx­i­mate­ly this” feels like it’s been through Google trans­la­tion one too many times.  I see the com­ple­ment — your blog is so good it reads like a book — even though a dis­joint series of thoughts does­n’t read like a book at all.

The next sen­tence is a com­plete botch of anoth­er com­mon theme: that you should write longer posts.  “… to dri­ve the mes­sage house…” … just “wow.”  They almost always claim that they’ll return.

Sigh.  But this com­ment was attached ten­ta­tive­ly to my Explo­sion Proof Fridge arti­cle… which is more than a year old.  Cer­tain­ly, as Spam, “I’ll be back” is appro­pri­ate.