The first line of this comment spam caught my eye as I was deleting it from another blog this morning:
Let me be the first panfish back on the piers in the spring and fall, the feeding trout will be moving very high in the pool, I pull on the oars and they dive under. The loss of fishing rod gimbal her mom and her passion for the sport any other time of the year.
Preserve the LandMake sure you fishing rod gimbal know the different varieties of fish
that can be had from the general fish market in you area.
I know people have used spam for poetry and such. My first thought is to see where this text actually originated.
But Googling for highly specific phrases turns up nothing but itself; no source, just the copy. It makes me wonder if unique texts are part of a feedback loop, key performance indicators for spammer. Do the Google results for “Let me be the first panfish back on the piers” [first 81, now 147] tell spammers something useful about the success or persistence of a deployment? Does it help identify sites that remain open to comment spamming?
Just as I was creating that link, I actually searched for a shorter phrase, “first panfish back on the piers in the spring,” which turned up “Carolina saltwater anglers getting in a last blast of sea mullet fishing,” a 2011 article from the Charlotte Examiner:
If the water stays warm whiting will continue to hit longer, if it gets too cold they will shut off. But they will be the first panfish back on the piers in the spring.
So the spam text generator’s standard unit is shorter than a sentence, but longer than a phrase.
Searching for another phrase, “moving very high in the pool,” somehow only turns up six results, and two of them are for a different sentence altogether:
Regardless of your exact location andd specific charter you
select, you will be moving very high in the pool as not to spook the holding fish. Hopefully we can start oout close and not have to despair because they cannot keep their trophy.
Bruce was having a great time, even if you did call me a ruin!
I make fishing estes park standard dishes every week,
but I could see it was murkier below annd the water was heavy.
Pink salmon are easy to catch, handle, hold, and release catfish will reduce stress and fishing estes park increase survival.
Here is one from the Grey Friars Pub in Ontario, whose second and last blog post, “How To Get Perfect Grill Marks,” has accumulated over 56,000 comments in 14 months. The “high in the pool” comment spam was posted on Oct. 21, 2013. The other instance, from just a couple of weeks ago, doesn’t have the typos. Do algo-generated comment spams have copyeditors?
The full text of my comment spam first turned up a month earlier, Sept. 28, 2013, in Honig Biene’s Gästebuch, which I can’t usefully link to, so I took a screenshot:
I don’t know what any of this means, if anything. Greater literary minds than I are probably putting together comment spam conferences as I type. But like the first panfish back on the piers in spring, I am gorging on the textual sand fleas of the internet, and I have been lured and caught by the text bait that has been dangled in front of me.