I knew I’d been gone for quite some time, but I had completely forgotten about how much volume a set of spambots can put out in a short period of time. 13,000+ comments deleted later, boy howdy. Just…boy howdy.

I think the first misunderstanding was an algorithm whoops. Russian spambots obviously do NOT speak nerd. I have an article where I discussed my use of a tutorial to make wings for my LARP harpist, Winter. So the Russians thought that Phys Rep had something to do with being a physician and I came back to a series of comments that were akin to the medical declarations of a doctoral thesis. And they were written in Botlish. My people, it was very, very bad.

So I started playing a game. I searched every comment with the word “physician” and marked all those comments as spam. Then I started pulling other specific words. It passed the time. After it got below 3,000 comments words like “doctor” and “pulmonary” weren’t going to work anymore… because so many of the comments WERE IN RUSSIAN.

• A few more reflections on spambot comments:
  • No, I will not write your paper for you
  • Did you really think that insulting my writing style was a good way to get me to hire you to edit my content? Also, there’s several grammatical errors in your copy/paste critique. Just in case you care.
  • No, Kristina, I am not the man you are looking to date/smash/boink/hook-up/skype-sex/whatever.
  • No, I do not need viagra, cibalis, or any of the other weird namebrand drugs you want to link here
  • Why are you critiquing the YouTube video in an article with no YouTube video
  • “I really liked the content of this article. It was well argued and had a good opening statement and summary at the end.” Wut. Even.
  • “I have been following you for a while now and I read you to my son over my morning coffee every morning. I guess I will finally have to subscribe because I love your content so much.” Let’s be real here: I don’t post that much content.
  • “Click this link.” No. Just… No.
  • And what’s with the weirdly specific porn flavors?
  • And can we take a second to reflect on the fact that the bot OBVIOUSLY thinks I’m male. Because the abbreviation “Phys” is in the title of the article. And, obviously, all Physicians are male…
  • To the bot that described itself as “a beautiful 21 year old girl with long black hair”: Call me. … Just kidding.

So if you’re entertaining the idea of starting a blog, just keep in mind that you’re going to have to check into it regularly to keep the spambots cleared out. Also, it’s a good idea to have your comments set up to “Approval Only.” Better yet, get someone else to moderate your comment section entirely. Because we all know the cardinal rule of the internet: NEVER READ THE COMMENTS.

It’s 10m to dinner.

The cat is calling and I must go…