Spam comments in esperanto?
Most of the comments to this blog are - unfortunately - spam. WordPress’s Akismet filters them out and I periodically review and delete them all. I don’t know why I bother, but once I had a real comment black-listed, so I keep making the effort. It is also semi-interesting to see how the spam attacks changed over time from automatic to semi-manual looking efforts.
Today’s collection had a comment that gave me a double take. It went like this:
-strange junk-
Kiel
vi fartas?
-spam links-
G^is revido
Which is obviously esperanto for ‘How are you’ and ‘See you later’ (though I prefer x notation myself in Gxis revido).
So, what happened there? I can see three options:
- Esperanto speaking spammer who decided to switch the ‘hello’ text upon seeing an Esperanto category in my blog
- Automatic software that looked for all blogs that mentioned Esperanto with hopes that the ‘less frequent’ language will not trigger spam filters
- Some sort of automatic spam algorithm picking out greetings based on the content of the blog; if that’s the case, the fact that somebody bothered adding Esperanto to their list is - in a perverse way - a cause to celebrate
I don’t think I will ever find out what happened, unless the original spammer comes back and comments on this post with the answer. Still, it is a food for thought.