Lately, Typepad spammers have pulled out all the stops, assailing blog posts with comments designed to look vaguely like the real thing but linking back to objectionable sites.
Every day I've been dutifully 1) marking them as spam, 2) deleting them and 3) adding significant key words to the block list.
Yet they keep coming!
In the depths of despair (ok, not despair, light annoyance) a revelation came to me :
SPAM JUJUTSU
From the Zen masters at Wikipedia:
"Jū" can be translated to mean "gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding." "Jutsu" can be translated to mean "art" or "technique" and represents manipulating the opponent's force against himself rather than confronting it with one's own force.[1]
My new approach: Keep the spammer's comment but
1) edit it to say what I would like it to say,
2) erase the original (offensive) link and
3) more or less keep the name of the commentator.
After all, the Spammers may have fancy algorithms and no morals, but I have control of blog content!!!
So from now on, if P - implant offers a particularly insightful comment about the French education system, we can thank the original Spammeister who plopped his comment, ripe for editing, into my email.
Thank you spammers!
ps: Given the deluge of spam I have been receiving I have amended my approach: I will now put *SPAM* in the comment and make fun of whoever is sending it to me.