Really, why post spam comments on a blog?

I’ve seriously considered making a section just to share the things Akismet and the fact that my comments area is moderated catches.

Frankly, the spammers, email or otherwise, are getting just plain insulting. They’re not even trying to make this stuff look like sensible English or remotely reputable … or anything really. It distinctly saddens me to think that there’re people out there who could somehow fall for this stuff, but more than that it upsets me that they’re trying so hard to get around and through anti-spam filters that it just looks plain stupid.

Work the con, guys. The old Nigerian Finance Minister emails of the late nineties is a good example. You could almost believe it. Now? Auto-comments by bots that are utter and complete nonsense. What is the world coming to these days? Where’s the professional pride? Where’s the artistry of the good short or long con? Have we passed and forever lost the days of Spider Robinson‘s Professor and the lot and ilk upon which he was based?

Not that I want to be conned, let’s not be absurd. I’m just insulted at the genuine lack of effort and thought. The clumsiness and … mass production of it all. Even cons aren’t artisans anymore. It’s no longer a custom, handmade scenario, oh no, just the output of a MegaHAL if there was any effort at all instead of just a crawlerbot with a pre-generated message for dumping into any code it finds that might be a forum post or comments section of a site which is only so much gibberish so it doesn’t have too many keywords too close togethe as to trip the security software. Pathetic.

Ah well, C’est la vie.

Still, while it’s insulting to the intelligence of most of us, at least it means the days of the effective widespread con ought to be coming to a close. Sooner or later even the gullible (not the most gullible, of course, if you make something foolproof they’ll just make a bigger fool, as they say) will fall for this stuff and it will become a profession that shall die of its own rot, thus protecting the populous at large from such unscrupulous fellows until such time as the original artistry of it shall be rediscovered, or reinvented in the fullness of time.

And now I think of it, I shan’t ugly up even a page all its own to any such idiotic nonsense. The spam comments will simply be relegated to the oblivion of the Empty SPAM button.