Dadaist Comment Spam

Okay, I told you before about this comment, posted to my all-fiction blog, Messages from Mâvarin:

are you serious?

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Posted by Neil Coan to Messages from Mâvarin at 11/28/2005 08:53:47 AM

Note that this comment was left in late November on a fiction entry (Meet Joshua Wander, Part Nine) that was posted in early January. I spent hours trying to analyze what the comment meant, and why it was posted. The best answer I could come up with was "nothing much," and "no good reason." Nor could I contact "Neil Coan," because when I tried to pull up the profile, Blogger said:

This Account is Closed.

We are sorry but this account is no longer active.


This cryptic comment was soon followed by an almost identical one:

are you serious?

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Posted by Rod Heilmann to Messages from Mâvarin at 12/06/2005 11:47:31 AM


I didn't know how to take this second comment, but I didn't worry about it as much as I had the first time around. This one was posted to Mall of Mâvarin, Part Four, from April 2005. It was hard to imagine any way the question could legitimately be applied to a fantasy serial installment about high school students having memories of another life in another world. And like "Neil Coan," the name "Rod Heilmann" was attached to a "no longer active" Blogger account.

About a week after that, I got a third cryptic comment:

Not bad.

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Posted by Ward Gaylord to Messages from Mâvarin at 12/12/2005 11:41:44 AM

This one was posted to one of my one-off Mâvarin fiction entries, "Another Letter from Uncle Jamek." I'd like to think that Jamek's cryptic letter to Crel is pretty good; but I was beginning to suspect that whoever posted the comment hadn't even read the entry.

Now, rounding out the set (at least for the moment), we have

There are different opinions on this subject.

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Posted by Raphael Muszynski to Messages from Mâvarin at 12/19/2005 10:27:04 AM

This one is posted to Mall of Mâvarin, Part Thirteen. Unless the commenter is a) one of my fictional characters or b) having a disagreement with a friend about whether my fiction is any good, there is no possible way for there to be "different opinions on the subject" of Cathy, Carl and Randy having an interdimensional adventure.

As far as I can tell, these are all the same kind of thing: random, anonymous comments that might superficially seem to apply to almost any blog entry, but which in truth have no more relevance than "Your polka dots are green," or "Resplendent chicks eat vegetables." If they had been posted to a political blog, they might have been mistaken for meaningful, but the fact that they appeared on a fiction blog exposes their utter lack of content.

Now, I see three possible explanations of these Dadaist comments:

1. Someone is deliberately yanking my chain.
2. Someone is generating particularly pointless comment spam.
3. Some computer virus, trojan horse or what-have-you is generating comment spam.

It seems unlikely that anyone would bother to post these comments just to confuse or annoy me, so let's move on to comment spam. Why in the world would anyone spam old blog entries with pointless remarks? None of these advertised anything, or had a viable link to anywhere. So what did they accomplish? Is it just relatively harmless geek fun, spamming for the intellectual challenge of writing the program, and the adolescent thrill of getting away with something? Or is it a dry run for some major comment spam, the sort that offers discounts on prescriptions, promotes sexy locals, or promises to improve the size and functioning of a body part I don't have in the first place?

Do I really want to know?

Karen