Spamming the blog fastidiously
As I have mentioned before, this blog receives about a dozen or two spam comments every day, most of them filtered out by the spam service of WordPress. Occasionally I check the quarantine folder to make sure no comments have been caught there that were actually legitimate.
One thing that strikes me in reading the spam comments is that many of them use very curious language. I am not commenting on the quality of their English: some of the spammers come from various overseas countries. But there is a pattern of expression that I find interesting. So for example, most spammers call this a ‘weblog’ rather than a ‘blog’ – which is notionally correct but strange. Less correct is the very frequent use by spammers of the word ‘fastidious’. Just today one urged me to ‘keep up the fastidious work.’ That does have a meaning, but probably not what he thought. And a total of 28 spammers have used ‘fastidious’ in their bogus comments over the past week.
Is there some spammers’ glossary that they use, designed to persuade filter systems that the comment is genuine? But why would it contain ‘fastidious’?
Just wondering.
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University Blog 
August 20, 2013 at 7:36 pm
lol, loved this post. I have also noticed the use of fastidious and also wondered why. If you get the answer, let me know lol
August 20, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Yours is not a unique experience, it would appear,
http://the-unmutual.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/fastidous-spam.html
a possible explanation here:
http://blogaude.com/spammers-gain-commenting-registering-blogs/
August 20, 2013 at 10:57 pm
That’s actually very interesting. Though I still don’t know where the popularity of ‘fastidious’ comes from.
August 21, 2013 at 8:11 am
Maybe you are fastidious! 🙂
August 21, 2013 at 10:55 am
I almost certainly am 🙂
August 21, 2013 at 3:40 am
I never read beyond the title on the stuff in the spam folder, and I keep it emptied.
What I’d like to do though is unplug the Follow button in WordPress. There are people linking in that I feel aren’t exactly bothered to read my utterances. I can’t put my finger on exactly how but I think it may well have something to do with the little notification that’s sent to your mail a/c and your backup mail a/c. Plus, I rarely use the Reader in WP. It’s clunky and difficult to get at.
But as annoying as this dross is, it in no way worries me as much as Twitter which seems to get compromised regularly with re-tweets that have no followers and aren’t following anyone and have sent 10 tweets. And that’s the benign aspect.