So, I have nothing to talk about today because the book report I was going to write today has the forbidden letter right there in the freakin’ title (despite that it’s one of the least-used letters in the English language!) so I thought I’d talk about a weird trend I’ve been seeing in spam comments in the last, I dunno, six months or so?
Formerly, all spam generally fell into two categories: spam that was pretending to be random comments and spam that was directly trying to sell me on their advertising services for the products they for some reason think I’m selling. (Seriously, if they’re trying to target businesses, why are they sending their spambots to blogs? Most blogs are not advertising products for sale.) Well, that and the more direct lists of links, but the spam filter trashes those right away without bothering to send them to the spam folder, so they don’t really count.
Now, I have never really understood the point of the random comment ones. They don’t contain links, and even the e-mails, fake user IDs, and URLs don’t always contain any indication of trying to move a product or get people to go to some site where they’ll pick up a virus, or whatever it is that the people behind spambots usually want. But usually one of those three factors would have something obvious, like they’d put the name of a product as their user name, or the URL would be to a store page. (There have always been make-me-laugh things about those random comment ones, of course. Like the ones talking about “great paragraph” or “so much informative” on a post on my dolly blog that consists exclusively of a photograph and zero words. Or the one today that was talking about “I passed this on to a colleague who is doing some research on this” on not a post (despite that it started with “nice post”) but a page which listed some of the dolls I would someday love to add to my collection.)
This new trend, though, it’s really weird.
It’s in the form of snippets cut from a bizarre narrative about the most unnatural family in the known universe, who sit around talking about what makes God happy as if it was the most fun and exciting game in the history of ever. Now, I admit I don’t know many deeply religious people. (Possibly not any.) But I guarantee that even in the most religious family in the modern world, little children don’t get all thrilled at the idea of talking about what makes God happy, or what the best thing about God is.
What actually bothers — even worries — me is the fact that this nonsense is being spammed onto my blog. Because as anyone will note who has read a lot of my posts, I am not religious. My views on religion are thus: there must be some being of vast cosmic power to have set up the laws of science and set the Big Bang in motion, but our puny human minds could never comprehend such an awesome power, so all religions are by necessity largely incorrect, and we should just focus on trying to be nice to each other, and not worry about the mystical cosmic stuff that’s out of our hands anyway, though of course “trying to be nice to each other” includes respecting other people’s religious views, so I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, and I want them to accept that I don’t necessarily agree with them. So with my lackadaisical, live-and-let-live policy on religious beliefs, seeing these…I don’t even know what to call them. I don’t think they’re actually religiously motivated, more like trying to take advantage of people who are religious? Whatever they are, it makes me uncomfortable finding them in my spam filter. I mean, do the spambots just target everything with open comment slots, or do they search for words that their programmer thinks will make the person responsible for the page more receptive? I realize it’s probably the former, but if I was responsible for a spambot, I’d prefer the latter (which makes it a good thing I’m not!).
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Yeah, like I said, I have nothing to say.
And my not saying it was delayed by going out and doing things today instead of sitting around writing this post, ’cause IRL always beats out online.
We're All Mad Here! 
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