If you run a blog and happen to have one of those days when you just don’t feel appreciated, we know what will cheer you up. Go check your comment spam.
No, seriously.
We use WordPress for this blog, and the vast majority of all comment spam is thankfully sorted away automagically. However, we haven’t cleared the spam archive in a while, and going through it the other day we were struck by the sheer amount of lavish praise it contains.
Praise! Lots of it! For us!
At some point spammers must have noticed that one way to get through the spam approval process was to appeal to every blogger’s vanity.
Go ahead, look through your comment spam. You’ll feel great. Here are people (uh, bots) who really understand you. There will be an abundance of comments mentioning how brilliant, fascinating, intelligent and just plain old great you and your blog posts are.
You can’t go wrong. Search your spam for “love your blog” and you’re likely to get pages of praise:
Not to mention how many people are enormously impressed by your blog. At least according to this search for “impressed”:
It doesn’t end there. Search for “fascinating,” “intelligent” and other flattering adjectives, and you’ll get lots of hits. Heck, we’ll even take the praise when the sender (uhm, bot) seems a bit confused, like this comment:
You have the absolute coolest physics blog ever. The only thing is, I don’t understand the high level of physics this is talking about. I find it fascinating though.
Yes, that blog post about web browsers was very heavy on the physics… But thanks. Really appreciate the kind words.
We never thought we’d say this, but spam has its upsides. Especially since we’re sure someone will soon tell us how intelligent, fascinating and brilliant this post is… 😉
Image credit: Spam wall courtesy of Freezelight.
