Judging by the comment moderation queue, this blog is wildly popular among a certain niche audience.<\/p>\n
Namely, spambots. Although I can't help but wonder why spammers are so incompetent<\/em>. Of course spammers have no reason to put any effort into the marginal<\/em> comment or email. The reason spam exists is precisely because in a magical land of near-zero marginal cost (like the internet), the unscrupulous can afford to send sales pitches to a million people even if only fifteen bite<\/a>. But that doesn't mean spammers couldn't put a little fixed-cost effort into improving their algorithm for generating those millions of spams. At least conventional advertising is occasionally entertaining; in contrast, most of the spam I see is just noise<\/em>, to the extent that it once gave me an idea (which I would not implement; it's not my style) for a Reddit novelty account: "CompetentSpammer" would write eloquent, insightful comments that ever-so-subtly worked in references to charm bracelets and sketchy pharmaceuticals.<\/p>\n I know, it sounds as if I'm complaining, but I'm not: we are all grateful that spam is so easily distinguished from actual content; I was only wondering.<\/p>\n If you don't know what I'm talking about, some commentary on spam comments submitted to this blog is below the break—<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Would-be commenter "charms" writes on "Summing the Multinomial Coefficients<\/a>":<\/p>\n \nI adore thomas family funeral home! I got my initial couple as soon as i was initially 10 yrs old, the sunlight yellow quite short old classic.Now i'm 15 yrs old nowadays and also, since after that, I have got as well received your ebony quite short old classic, your bleak quite short old classic, [...]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And it goes on like that for another ninety words. One wonders: is anyone really<\/em> going to buy shoes or whatever based on a blog comment like that? Maybe, maybe<\/em> fifteen out of a million ... which I guess was the point. But again, one imagines that there would be a payoff to spammers for being more discriminating—I guess some them are. I got a few attempted comments referring to Zack Snyder<\/a>, so someone's at least paying attention to the URL.<\/p>\n I even got one attempted comment that sort-of looks<\/em> on topic, maybe, if you don't look too closely? "Alexey" writes on "Interpolating Between Vectorized Green's Theorems<\/a>":<\/p>\n \nGreat! I see how to finish it off now, and I see why given the dftierenfial equation and being told to look at F and f you would see that relation, but just introducing F in the first place well, I guess I just have to accept this proof is awesome. =DYou asked for topic areas: Have you ever seen Euler's proof that the number of partitions of a number into odd numbers equals that of a number into distinct numbers? That is a good one. Other than that, some Galois theory would be nice?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The comment throws around a lot of math terminology, but if it has any non-coincidental relationship to my post, I don't see it. And the URL supplied just goes to a near-empty Facebook profile. What's even the motive here? Maybe I'm wrong to think of this as \"spam\", when it could be a genuine math enthusiast who's confused, or bad at commmunicating in English? Who can say but that, in the end, what we really hate are low-quality comments, and we don't care whether or not they're trying to sell us something? (See also xkcd<\/em> #810<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Judging by the comment moderation queue, this blog is wildly popular among a certain niche audience. Namely, spambots. Although I can't help but wonder why spammers are so incompetent. Of course spammers have no reason to put any effort into … Continue reading