The Wisdom of Spam
Recently I have been getting a ridiculous amount of spam in the form of comments on this blog (ridiculous as in, I’ve probably had over a thousand in the last couple of months). Fortunately, I have been able to block most of it.
Some of this spam, however, is really quite sophisticated entertaining. Here is a selection of the best efforts to evade my filters.
Note: All of these spams (automated too, by the way) came from a fr__ onlin_ pok_r site. [I don’t want to be appearing in search results for those terms].
I guess there’s one spammer who can’t sleep at night:
Insomnia can become a form of contemplation. You just lie there, inert, helpless, alone, in the dark, and let yourself be crushed by the inscrutable tyranny of time.
Another has guy problems:
Men have never been good, they are not good, they never will be good.
Next up is an anti-creationist spammer…
The fundamentalists, by ‘knowing’ the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
…and another who doesn’t like a certain German philosopher:
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
This guy obviously doesn’t like Catholics (and completely misunderstands the history of the Church):
The Papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
Oooh:
If you’re doing philosophy at all, if you’re engaged in the way that ideas work, then it’s a male peculiarity to wish to go right up in the air and go round in circles without relating them to anything else.
He thinks I’m someone else, I feel:
You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.
And finally, some recycled wisdom from this guy:
Know thyself. by fr__ onlin_ pok_r.
Thank you, spam, for being so willing to engage in philosophical discussion with me. You bring sunshine into my life.
Comment by Angus • Tue 28 Dec 04, 5:51 pm #
Hmm… IP blacklist possible if it’s one guy? Complain to the ISP?
Or perhaps change the name of your wp-comments-post.php script to something completely random, and have some JavaScript in the page that decodes and assigns the correct ACTION attribute to the FORM tag (so as not to be found by spammers’ JS-unaware webcrawlers)? I’d be quite happy to write you a cross-browser version of that; it should be quite spambot proof. For bonus points, leave in the default wp-comments-post.php file and make it return a dummy page so spammers keep getting distracted, with some kind of notification to humans that their post failed.
Comment by Brehaut • Wed 29 Dec 04, 11:10 am #
You probably saw this on photomatt as well, but
http://www.untergeek.com/index.php?p=429
claims to have a wickedly good spam blocker for WP.
Comment by Angus • Wed 29 Dec 04, 4:24 pm #
Subsequently to my earlier outporing of JS-related wisdom, here’s another article on JS and WP Comment Spam.
Hope some/any/whatever of this is useful to you! Perhaps try one of the server-side Bayesian filters first and fall back onto JS afterwards…
Comment by michelle is cool • Tue 4 Jan 05, 11:06 am #
how exciting, Dr Johnson! I have often wondered about the meaning of ‘what is the time?’ myself. What is time? what is a ‘meaning’? what is the concept of a question?
Argh.. my brain is exploding!
but what does it mean to explode?
Help, Ferdy, help!