I love these user comments on my site

[ergophobe]

Love this comment

Recently saw your comment on my own blog and that's how i came to know about your site. Each article I have read is very well written and to the point. I would also like to say, not only are the posts well written, but the design of your web-site is excellent. I was able to navigate from post to post and find what I was looking for with ease. Keep up the great work you are doing, and I will be back many times in the near future

What I love about it, is that it's a placeholder site that I put up as demo to show how to install Wordpress. The two actual pages on the site were written in 5 minutes and are more less meaningless gibberish.

I would put some better spam filtering on it, but having this out there keeps me up to date on the latest spam message formats :-)

[martinibuster]

Lol, that's well written spam.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I am Madan, Marketing Manager with a reputed online marketing company based in New Delhi, India.I was surfing through your website and realized that despite having a good design; it was not ranking on any of the search engines for most of the keywords pertaining to your domain.I was wondering if you would be interested in getting the SEO done for your website.

This is related to a website of mine that is number two in Google worldwide (after Wikipedia) for its main KW, which is a four letter acronym. I am afraid I no longer find these amusing. I just get angry. :-<

[londrum]

these spammers certainly are getting polite. next thing we know they'll be sending us gifts through the post

[rocker]

Recently saw your comment on my own blog and that's how i came to know about your site.

1) Did they leave their web address?
2) Did you take the bait?

[phranque]

Hey admin, I have a simple request. I was just searching for some info on this topic and found this post. Some really cool stuff you shared here, can I please link to this post on my new website I'm currently workin' on? It would be great:). I will check back again later to see how you responded. Regards, Link Builder

[ergophobe]

I am afraid I no longer find these amusing.

Now, a live and active site that I help out with has hundreds of these per day and Akismet+HashCash+? can't stop the flood. I don't find it amusing. I only find it amusing in the current case because the site is 100% dead. I put it on a junk domain for a demo for a pubcon talk (phranque may now recognize the "site" I'm talking about).

I only built it to time how long it took me to go through all the steps to get online
- register domain
- sign up for hosting (only did part of this because I stopped at the payment part, knowing I was going to host it on an existing account).
- install wordpress
- theme it
- add a contact form, analytics and some basic wordpress SEO stuff [webmasterworld.com]
- write two pages of gibberish content plus an About Us page

This was all done in less than two hours. This site has not been touched since. If I want to find it, I need to look it up to remind myself what the domain name is.

1) Did they leave their web address?
2) Did you take the bait?

1. Yes
2. No

And that's why I find this amusing, whereas I don't on a site that's actually a real site. I don't even have to read the comments to know they're spam. It's pretty much inconceivable that anyone would find the site and, having done that, leave a comment.

I only read the comments to see if there's anything new and interesting in the spammer world. This comment, with good flow and being well-written is not something that I would automatically assume to be spam if it appeared on a legit site aside from the utter vagueness of it and, of course, the product link.

[ergophobe]

PS... the "site" if you can call it that got 7 uniques last month, 4 from google.co.uk and only one from google.com, which, adjusting for population differences, shows conclusively (p value of probably approaching 1 on this) that Brits are 20 times more bored than Americans.

Strangely, the bounce rate is a fairly low (considering the utter lack of content) 47% over the last 44 visits. My theory is that many people try to visit one more page, simply because they're somewhat perplexed as to why a site with no real content exists and they think there must be something more to it. The second page view usually confirms that there is nothing more to it. Some people are optimists though and persist on through to a third page, which is why the avg page views per visitor is 2.39, which pretty much maxes things out, because at three page views, they've loaded every page once.

One last thing. Despite the utter lack of content, I expect to be this to be one of the biggest sites on the web in three years. The proof is again in the analytics

July: 0 visits
Aug: 4 visits
Sept: 7 visits

This may be some asymptotic curve, or this could be just a minor variation in the data. Assuming a minor variation in the data, and being an optimist, that's what I'm assuming, site traffic is doubling each month. This means that in 36 months, I'll be getting 68,719,476,736 visitors, which might max out the shared hosting account that it's currently on, but I should be able to make a killing selling Farmville crap because 68,719,476,736 visitors that bored and lonely are the perfect market for that, uh..., product.

On the other hand, for the pessimists in the crowd, if the data are accurate and this is aymptotic, it looks like I'll top out at around 14 visitors per month and though I won't make zillions off selling Farmville accessories, I should be okay on the shared hosting.

I hope you've all learned something from this that will help you in your futures endeavours. I see some of your sites is not rank. If you need SEO helps, please contact our firms. Thank you sirs and madames.

[phranque]

i have comments going into moderation for a blog for a year now.
there are three posts - the standard "hello, world!", the "about this blog" post, and one perfectly legitimate post.

here's a small sample of typical comments on the "about"post:

Thank you very much for this fantastic article; this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the day. I?ve been looking around for your blog after I heard about them from a buddy and was thrilled when I was able to find it after looking for some time. Being an avid blogger, I?m pleased to see others taking initiative and contributing to the community. I just wanted to comment to show my appreciation for your work as it?s very encouraging, and many writers do not get the credit they deserve. I?m sure I?ll be back and will send some of my friends

Very informative text. I've found your blog via Bing and I'm really glad about the information you provide in your articles. Btw your blogs layout is really messed up on the Kmelon browser. Would be really great if you could fix that. Anyhow keep up the good work!

Hey, I just adore your posts! :) is it alright if I use some of the information from this blog post if I make a link back to your site?

[ergophobe]

Ahh.... and I think with a bit of sleuthing, I may have even found the site in question. Matches the description, but I suppose thousands do. No privacy left on the web. Tried to find mine using the same method and couldn't though.

Anyway, the one I'm talking about has even *less* content than what you describe. No legit posts and not even a legit "about us" and no future hopes/plans of adding any such thing. Will let the domain expire in another few weeks. It's only still live b/c domain reg lasts a year.

[phranque]

{hey|hi|hey there|howdy} {i|I} read your {blog|web log|web logs} {all|every} the time, you have {some|many|numerous} {great|good|wonderful|fantastic|tremendous|special|solid} things to {say|sound out}. My {readers|subscribers|reviewers} would like your {style|manner|flair}, do you {think|believe|imagine|consider} you could be a {guest|invitee} blogger for me?