Perspective
May 13th, 2008 by WaltI was looking at the stats for Ars Math, when I saw that we’ve had 525 posts. I thought “Wow, that’s a lot of posts.” Then my eye happened to glance at the count of the number of comments the Akismet plug-in has deleted as spam: 304,061.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:17 am
579.16381 spams for every legitimate comment? Sad, but plausible.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:26 am
As I’ve observed before, this blog seems to get much more than its fair share of spam. Could it have anything to do with the proximity of ‘Ars’ to ‘arse’? Otherwise I’m at a loss to explain.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
arse mathematica:
“Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”
To see what he saw, enter your credit card number now…
May 14th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Brilliant, Jonathan! LOL!
May 15th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
There’s also another category, currently illustrated by 43985edc92e8’s post on “Proof Style,” consisting of a slightly extended version of the string “43985edc92e8″ and linking to a non-existent website, “43985edc92e8.com”
It isn’t exactly spam, and I guess you would have to call it “auto-eponymous dead-link gibberish,” if you called it anything.
“I am my own message,” says 43985edc92e8, “and none of you will ever know what I mean.”
May 15th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
It must be some Google manipulation strategy. (Though the people who write the spam software must have to test it, right? Maybe these are test spams.)