Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and ...

A little while after I published my fake mailbag question, I decided to change my blog settings so that email and comments posted to the blog would be forwarded to my work email address. The blog automatically posts some comments, but it turns out a great deal of them are filtered automatically. How many? I had no idea, until they started getting sent (but not posted).

I noticed a distinctive trend amongst the spam comments that were passed along (and no, there haven't been any "real" comments or emails passed sent, but I'm not surprised): they all tended to be one word and feature car brands or map-quest in the links. I also noted there were only 4 different words used, with varying amounts of punctuation.

So out of morbid curiosity, I decided to track all of the comments. Here are the results, in case you are also morbidly curious:

Comment	Frequency
Cool.	47
Cool...	49
Cool!	40
Interesting...	44
interesting	51
Nice	36
Nice...	37
Nice	37
Sorry :(	44

385 comments thus far.

My favorite? I sort of like the "Sorry :(". For some reason, its good to know the spammers empathize with me, even if the empathy they are feeling is for a technical blog. It shows the spammers are human, too.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 06, 2007
  I got a spam message yesterday asking if I knew about "captha" as a way to cut down on spam. <grin>