Okay, so I’ve been away. I may get to the details of that at a later point in time, but more importantly, here I am, back and ready to rock. Obviously after a little break, one of the things that I discovered is that there was a certain amount of spam comments which had been posted onto my site.

My spam filters had done their job pretty well — by my reckoning, only around 1-2% of the spam comments actually made it through to publication (although of course even those have now been disposed of). But that left an awful amount of spam in the queue.

Since I normally blitz any spam before it has a chance to build up, I thought it might be nice to take the opportunity to look through the spam and work out the different types of spam it consisted of, and the relative proportions these took up.

This was a somewhat time consuming exercise as it required me to manually classify each item from over 800 items of spam. I also decided to place each item into only one category (“jokes”, “online pharmacy” and so on) which was of course not wholly reflective of the actuality, as some spam items may, for example, tell a (crap) joke and then direct me to places where I might buy various pharmaceuticals.

And there were a lot of those telling me where to buy pharmaceuticals.

With 845 spam items altogether, online pharmaceuticals were by far the biggest category, making up 22% of all spam. There’s a lovely advert (I think produced by Pfizer, but I could be wrong) which illustrates the danger of buying fake medicines online, pointing out that you don’t know what’s actually in it: it may contain rat poison…

Although given that in my youth (sorry, earlier youth) I worked in a pharmacy and was fully aware that doctors would prescribe stuff such as Warfarin (which was used as a rat poison) for treatment of certain medical conditions, leads me to wonder exactly what sort of rat poison the advert is talking about.

But anyway, don’t buy this crap.

What next? Oh yes, the random or pseudorandom string of letters. I tend to think this is a tester for spammers: it gives them the chance to later on search for “fzzbx” or whatever it was, and if it is online, they know those sites aren’t particularly well protected. This made up a further 17% of the spam, closely followed in size order by ‘other’ on 12%.

Of course ‘other’ doesn’t mean much by itself: it is only meaningful once we know what it is other than, so moving swiftly on, we find that the next biggest section of spam sent to my site is piano-related. Yes, piano-related. 91 spam comments, almost 11%. Can anyone explain why?

I wouldn’t have thought my site would score particularly highly in piano-related searches. I am not, after all, a music maestro… well, maybe I am, but the wife, kids, and anyone else who has heard me would tend to disagree.

Then there’s the people who say stuff like “Very Nice Site” (I know) “MegaCool Blog” (I know) “Great Article” (I know) or “You’re really hot and sexy” (goes without saying) in order to try and get me to publish their links (around 10%). I wouldn’t mind, but when they’re just stating the bleeding obvious like this, it’s hardly even flattery, so I’m certainly not going to put their links on.

Then we’ve got meaningless lists of links and unsupported characters… where the spam appears like this:

????????? ????????? ??????? ????????? ????????

…which I tend to presume is submitted in a character set my computer doesn’t support — this makes up just over 8%. This is followed by those 6% who seem to think I would have some interest in actually paying real money to obtain gold in World of Warcraft or similar games. Quick tip: I’m happy to be paid money, I’m not so keen on handing it over. I also included “other techy” spam in this category, where I found a wonderful quote from someone saying how bulletproof their server was, and how the uptime was really fantastic:

my server is managed uptime 2×4

Not 24×7, you note. It’s 2×4, which sounds a bit more like a plank of wood, or possibly suggests that their server runs for two hours a day, four days a week. I don’t know about you, but I’d be looking for a bit more uptime than that.

There was another one in this section which I classed as ‘techy’ because they talked about online reports, even though it sounded a bit detectivey…

If you know someone around you who is being a little shady and you are getting uncomfortable around them, then maybe you might want to run a small background report on the person in question

E.g. Your spouse is particularly attentive or particularly inattentive towards you.

I like that. If your spouse is being attentive, they must be cheating. If they are not attentive, they must be cheating. Nothing like paranoia to drum up a bit of business, is there? But wait a minute, I can think of someone who is definitely a bit shady…

Then you’ve got 5% which are links to sites which sound pornographic and with varying degrees of dubiousness. I’m sure that there are niche markets for all the content they claim to be providing, however. And as I’ve said before, if you really are Angelina Jolie (or Paris Hilton), and you want me to see you nude, just pop round and take your clothes off, rather than bothering with this dubious website business. You might want to give me a ring first though, just to make sure the missus is out.

Then we had the bloke who kept being reminded of stuff that wasn’t really relevant. There were forty two (5%) comments along these lines:

This makes me remember something funny that my brother used to say…
However its so not appropriate right now…

The relative in question changed from time to time — father, mother, sister, and grandmother all got a mention — but at no point did the person ever specifically say what was funny. Bloody spammers.

The credit crunch wasn’t causing quite the spam explosion I had expected though, with only 3% of the spam relating to making money online, credit reports and the like.

But there was a single piece of spam I had to single out as my favourite:

The Women’s Party brought centuries of enlightened rule to this planet. We had prosperity, there was a good tourist trade, no one suffered. So maybe men voted a few years later than women or couldn’t get the best jobs.

Can’t remember what link they were trying to get in, but I can appreciate their taste in literature. It’s a quote (possibly slightly mangled) from a novel by Harry Harrison, featuring one James Bolivar DiGriz, also known as “The Stainless Steel Rat”: international master criminal. If you’ve not read any of them, may I suggest you start your collection with The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus?