One of the things that I dislike most about comment spammers is that they take otherwise useful or pleasing phrases and make them part of their spam comments. For instance, “Nice post.”

It’s not that I don’t like friendly, complimentary comments. It’s just that, more often than not, that phrase at the beginning of a comment is followed by gibberish. Although at a quick glance the gibberish can sometimes look like a rational, relevant comment.

My assumption is that the “comments” are created by a bot, and the reason the “comment” looks on a quick glance to be relevant is that it repeats words or phrases from the post being commented on. Take the following, for instance, a comment on a post I wrote about how rural communities are being short-changed in the broadband department:

Nice post but with the passage of time many opportunities has been provided in the rural areas as i think government should have in try to solve this problem.Well nice thought

My first reaction was that this was from a non-native speaker of English and was probably ok enough to let through. Then I read it properly and realized it was one of those sneaky spam comments that masquerade as a real, relevant comment.

A bit more coherent than the one which followed:

Thanks for the informations.There are so many networking things out here.My head goes spinning on….

Good for a laugh the first few times, perhaps. But boring and annoying after a while.

Someone once queried my mistrusting the comment “Good post”.

All I can say is, blame the spammers.