Spam

When you have a blog, you have to choose how open you are to the world beyond. You can limit comments, require commenters to pass some kind of screening, or you can close your blog to any comments at all. So far, I've chosen to let Doves Today be completely open to comments, but that means anyone can post anything they want.

If I find something offensive, I can delete it. So far, though, I haven't deleted any comments for being offensive - but I have deleted things.

Spam. I get spam, sometimes. If I look back at my list of posts, sometimes I'll see that an entry that garnered maybe 5 or 6 comments from readers suddenly has 30 comments. And they're all in Chinese! It's a mystery to me why a company would think it could gain sales by posting fake, robot-generated nonsense on a blog like mine, but somewhere, someone does.

Yesterday I found a string of comments, all with links to a shopping site for power tool. I think they're intended to spur a reaction like - "Gee, that comment is so intriguing, I think I'll pop over to that link. Hey! low prices on Ryobi chop saws!"

But collectively, the comments were pretty funny - it was like a Gertrude Stein poem -

We should be painstaking and perceptive in all the advice we give. We should be signally prudent in giving guidance that we would not think of following ourselves.

We should be chary and particular in all the advice we give. We should be especially prudent in giving information that we would not think of following ourselves.

We should be careful and particular in all the information we give. We should be especially prudent in giving information that we would not about of following ourselves

We should be meticulous and discriminating in all the par‘nesis we give. We should be signally prudent in giving advice that we would not dream up of following ourselves.

We should be chary and particular in all the information we give. We should be signally careful in giving information that we would not dream up of following ourselves.

We should be meticulous and discriminating in all the intelligence we give. We should be extraordinarily careful in giving opinion that we would not think of following ourselves.

We should be careful and discriminating in all the advice we give. We should be signally painstaking in giving guidance that we would not about of following ourselves.

We should be meticulous and particular in all the information we give. We should be especially aware in giving opinion that we would not think of following ourselves.

There were two stand-alone comments worthy of note:

A gink begins sneering his perceptiveness teeth the initially time he bites on holiday more than he can chew.

and

A humankind who dares to atrophy bromide hour of age has not discovered the value of life.

Who needs poets when we have automated spam-bots?