Essay writing spam comments
By andre
For the last couple of years I repeatedly see submissions of spam comments to my web site, which advertise “essay writing services” (read - cheating at course assignments for money) for students. I receive at least a couple a day, sometimes tens of them. This is despite having enabled CAPTCHA validation of comments submissions. The spammers’ software manages to circumvent this protection, albeit not always - most of the undesirable content is stopped. What really puzzles me, however, is the extremely poor wording of these spam messages. They are written in extremely broken English and it is hard sometimes to understand exactly what they are trying to say. And they don’t seem to evolve - the same templates are used time and time again. One would think, that when advertising a language-related service, even an illegal one, one should make an effort to describe it accurately and using correct grammar. And their incessant attempts to submit these comments? Not a single one has made it through to the actual Internet on my site, but their software keeps trying. Wouldn’t it be wiser and more time efficient to stop trying to publish after x failed attempts?
In Danel Soarez’s book DAEMON there is a scene, where a human “operator”, controlled by a mysterious semi-artificial intelligence, locates and brutally executes a small group of spammers in an unnamed warehouse somewhere in the USA. This episode has no direct relation to the rest of the content of the book, but, I suspect, the author dislikes spammers as much as I do, and used the creator’s license to take revenge upon them, even if of this virtual kind.