Fortunately, this blog has a pretty decent spam-blocker. So only a couple per week of the pesky little things escape its pincher grip to actually be deposited in the comments section.

They tend to rather resemble one another. But one that came through today had a certain extra je ne sais quoi:

Can you provide more information on this? So far the info in your post is awesome . In the mean while I think im gonna stick around and read about 2 of your posts.

I love the casualness of the “gonna”—nice touch, spambot!—as well as the odd specificity of the plan to read 2 posts, a precision negated by the wishy-washy qualifier “about.” Make up your mind, bot!

I thought I’d write a little post about spambots and how they use flattery as a technique to sucker us poor bloggers in. And then I realized that the whole thing had a familiar feel—and I discovered that yes, I’ve passed this way before. Back in my first months of blogging, I wrote a piece on the subject, and nothing much has changed, except the amount of time I have to give over to the task of weeding out the bots (fortunately, a lot less than it used to be). So rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s an only slightly edited version of the original:

For those of you who don’t know what spambots are, a spambot comment (or, to be technical, a UBS, an unsolicited bulk comment) is an automatically-generated message sent out to many blogs at a time and deposited, like little turdlike droppings, in the comments sections of blogs. Spambots masquerade as real people making real comments.

What is their purpose? To make money for somebody, in this case increasing Google rankings and/or persuading you to click on a link and thereby inflate the hit counter of a commercial blog, or a blog front, and maybe even order something (although that must be extra-rare).

The spambots are very friendly. Whoever designs the spambot programs know that we humans are suckers for praise. So the spambots give out a sentence or two that sounds enthusiastic and is apparently music to the ears of many a lonely blogger who’s been waiting in vain to receive a comment or two: “You’ve got a great blog here! I’ve bookmarked it. Hope you visit mine, http://lawnmowers.blogspot.com. It’s all about lawnmowers and other cool stuff like that.”

I once clicked on one of these spambot sites out of curiosity, despite knowing that the comment was spam and would probably lead me to a dummy site and make money for the spambot designers (my lips are sealed as to the URL of the site, but let’s just say the blog had something to do with recipes for a certain dessert). It consisted of two posts—that was the whole blog—each with a short list of recipes.

But that blog had a very active comments section. There were over fifty on one of the posts, as I recall. So it was clear that the spambot had achieved its aim of getting a fair number of people to the site (note how I’m anthropomorphizing the spambot; it’s hard not to do so, they seem so pesky and duplicitous). Quite a few of the commenters on the spam blog, however, were not pleased; they posted little messages on the order of “You effing a-hole spambot, get off my blog and never come back”

But a large number of the commenters seemed touchingly grateful. They said things like, “So glad you liked my blog! Come back soon. Thanks for the recipes.”

At first I thought these might be second-generation counter-spambots, like in some sci-fi movie, evolving to make war on the original spambots and kill them with kindness. But no, they seemed to be real people with real blogs, seduced by flattery into thinking that finally, finally, they’d found a grateful and appreciative reader in the spambot, which of course they took to be a real person.

I’m not meaning to mock these people. I well remember the times when I was getting a grand total of five readers a day on this blog—and three of them were me, because I didn’t know how to block my own IP address; and the other two had reached here in error. So I know what it’s like to plod away in isolation and hope to be discovered. But I like to think that even in those days a spambot wouldn’t have fooled me.