Spammers of the world unite. Well, there's no need for them to do so: they already create a passing impression of being a strong, cohesive world movement.
Overnight, my good friends at footballunited.com, the umbrella network for my football website Salut! Sunderland, notched up the 5000th thwarted attempt by SEO ("search engine optimisation") specialists, company IT geeks and others to dump drivel in the comments field.
The message came from something called the Freelance Work Exchange. It came complete with a bogus email address (standard practice), purported to respond to an item about the 1966 World Cup and read:
Yes, I was totally in tune with that. So was my brother. He said he will check it out soon. We will return before you know it.
Others in the overnight batch of 50 or so pieces of e-mailed gibberish contained equally mindless messages. The links included lots of ostensibly legitimate businesses dealing with wedding toasts, how to stop smoking, weight loss, children's health (and toys), legal services and, best of all, colon cleansing. And dodgier-sounding outfits flogging replica handbags, get-rich-quick schemes and so on.
I still don't know precisely what drives these people or even what they would get out of it if the comments appeared, even briefly.
One link, on the face of it, to the make-money-from-blogging enterprise of Rob Benwell ended up at something called tiny.cc which claimed it had no connection with the spammer and was a victim, too. Is this genuine, or - since they go on to offer services of their own - double-talk? I'll give them the benefit of doubt.
You may wonder why I find this so irritating if football.united is so god at identifying and filtering spam. Well, Salut! Sunderland receives many more hits, and therefore comments, than Salut! and the spam has to be sorted by me before messages from people commenting (genuinely) for the first time can appear. I get the odd Viagra spam here but tend to deal with it retrospectively.
The spamming is getting cleverer and cleverer, picking up actual words or subject matter from the items to which the irrelevant messages are sent as comments.
And one has me baffled completely.
It bears all the hallmarks of a spam comment - a link to a site dealing with school truancy, but in a message purportedly commenting on my friend Pete Sixsmith's entertaining account of a trip to Cambridgeshire for a football game. He is a teacher, but attendance at the match did not require him to play truant.
The message starts in classic spamming fashion: "Love your blog! I would start one of my own but I don't like people disagreeing with my opinions haha."
But then, curiously, it goes on: "I'm an Arsenal fan but I have a lot of respect for Sunderland as they tend to give us a tough game. As for the puzzle, wasn't that in Die Hard 3? I'll always remember the answer now but I won't lie: I wouldn't have got it myself."
The site, as most Salut! readers know, is mainly for Sunderland AFC supporters. There was, indeed, a puzzle in the content. It referred to the rhyme starting "As I was going to St Ives/ I met a man with seven wives" and that rhyme does apparently receive mention in Die Hard 3.
But "truancy call"? A business offering to send automated messages alerting parents to their children's absence from school? On a football site? Seriously clever spamming, or just a try-on by someone with a genuine interest in the content of the site?
If "Stacie and Pete", the names in the e-mail address (which, deepening the mystery, did not attract an instant "doesn't exist" bounceback), are real people, the pages of Salut! are open to them. Explain yourselves.
And if anyone out there is involved in SEO services, perhaps they could let us know whether theirs is work that can be conducted legitimately and ethically or must invariably rely on spamming.
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