Gone East

A good kind of SPAM

As this blog matures, and the readership grows, I'm getting SPAM in the comments area more and more often. I don't currently use any automated system to defend against this stuff. When I see it I go in and manually ban the sender, then delete the SPAM.

But comment SPAMers have recently started trying to camoflage themselves by including surprisingly relevant-seeming content in their comments. They do this in the hope that it will keep them from being noticed, and the URL to the commercial site, which was the real purpose of the comment, will survive.

Like I said, I usually nuke the entire comment, but a couple of times recently the "random" content has been either an interesting quote, or a strangely entertaining observation. In these cases I've been banning the sender, removing the URL to the commercial site, and LEAVING the rest of the SPAM.

It's just part of the service here at GE, as we try to entertain and inform.