Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Thank You for Sharing: I've been getting an extraordinary amount of spam these days on the Readers Respond pages on my About.com site. These always appear to be entries legitimately made somewhere else and then picked up by a spam bot and tossed into other spaces just to see what sticks. It's kind of a weird sort of plagiarism -- apparently, any comment you leave anywhere might turn up anywhere else that no one's monitoring for spam. Sometimes they sort of fit the topic, more often they don't, always they have some telltale collection of alphabet letters in the "name" box so it's clearly not submitted by an actual human this time around, and generally I can plug the responses into Google and find those exact words in multiple spots on the Web. I kind of like spam better when it's a list of handbags of something that makes its intentions plain. Either way, though, it gets cut.

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