The amount of spam that rains down on the comments section here is overwhelming. I just got done cleaning out more than 1,600 spam comments — a task made easy by Akismet. In fact, without that software, I’d have to kill comments here entirely — it would be impossible to monitor the comments and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Most of the spam comments are nothing more than endless links to various shady alleged prescription drug sites or porn sites — most of which are probably zombie-seeding/password-sniffing/credit-card-stealing operations. For some reason, the spammers seem to particularly like to target my 2008 posts on making homemade pastrami or Bobby Fischer. They’re in a variety of languages (Russian, to no one’s surprise, is particularly popular), and the word ‘porn’ apparently means ‘porn’ in many languages.

Some of the more recent attempts are sort of quasi-disguised as real posts, although they often are written in a form of pidgeon English that is fun to attempt to decipher. “I craved them to shift as static and assured as likely,” states one post, for example. Another states, “One should sun over sized and undersized shoes,” which seems like a good idea. A third post: “Level a squat storey figurer purchaser much as myself is mindful of while test championing above a ten.”

Akismet does a remarkable job of not creating “ham” — marking real posts as spam. I’ve only seen one of those ever, although it’s not like I scan the hundreds of spam comments to find that diamond in the rough.

Right now, I’m about to push the button and delete 83 pages of spam comments. One of them simply states, “Path to the Truth starts here.” I somehow doubt that.

Previously: This is the post about The Black Keys | Hokum home