I knew it was going to happen. I installed the Do-Follow plugin just two days ago and already the spam comments have started trickling in. Here’s the first:

Thanks for this. You was help me. Article who your writen was so important for me. Thanks again

Besides the obvious grammatical and spelling errors (it could be a Language Poem, couldn’t it?), the amazing thing about this comment is that it was made on my Comment Policy page, not a blog post. The Comment Policy page reads, in part, thus:

Spam will not be tolerated. All comments that look like spam and act like spam will be treated as spam and be instantly deleted.

I thought that was pretty clear. I know this is a bot generating the comment, but behind that bot is a human being who registered as a blog user, a spam control requirement I’ve instituted for just that purpose. I could set my WordPress settings to require commentators to be logged in to leave a comment and that would stop the bots, but it would also stop the human commentators (a lot of them). I don’t want to do that. The amusing thing is it took just two days before I landed on some Do-Follow list to get these well-written Flarf messages.

So if there are any Google Sculpters who want some new content for their next poem, you have my permission to use the spam comment above. And I don’t think you have to worry about the commentator suing you (they do, after all, actually own the rights to the content).

BTW, Spammer, you’re welcome.