I recently received this comment in my for moderation bin:

Dr. Riekeyword – Child Abuse Avoidance Suggestion Tool

We like your blog!…

[…]Mabuhay, my colleagues and I heard of your blog over at McBrides, so we thought we would take a look. We’ve read several of your posts and we all agree that you have a fine writing style[…]

I checked out the website. It’s a legit site dedicated to researching how to prevent child abuse, based out of the Philippines. I checked out the IP address, and it is indeed an IP from the Philippines. I was still a little suspicious (for those who don’t know, IP addresses are easy to fake), so I Googled it. It turns out this same comment is showing up in blogs all over the Internet. Why? Because it’s likely to get approved. But once a comment has been approved, subsequent comments by that registered user are automatically approved. So what we’re probably looking at is a spam bot that’s working its way into thousands of blogs. One day, a switch will get flipped and those thousands of blogs will be absolutely flooded with spam.

I thought that it might be possible that the creator of this website is trying to get backlinks to her site (for SEO rankings and to cash in on other blogs’ popularity). But if so, a little more effort would probably be put into the comments. It wouldn’t be the same comment, word for word, pasted into hundreds of blogs. And anyway, blogging software by default puts a nofollow on outgoing links in comments, so they don’t get any SEO rankings for backlinks from blogs.

If you’ve allowed this comment into your blog, you might want to delete it and delete the user as well. Let me know if you have any evidence to the contrary.

Franny just turned 1 in November, which places her at about sixteen or seventeen months. In cat years, that actually works out to about seventeen years old. Holy smokes, that means our little girl is driving! She’s almost old enough to vote! She’s almost old enough to go to war and die for her cat country. This is so depressing. I’m just glad she’s going to an in-state college.

We’re going to be hosting Sam (another cat) for a few days for Jon and Mary. So I was thinking we should have a little cat prom for Franny. (Zoey’s too young for cat prom.) Of course, Sam is 25 in cat years. That’s kind of like me and Janelle, so I guess it’s okay. We’re going to take prom pictures. Just you wait and see.

In other news, I’m now getting anywhere between 20 and 40 spam e-mail messages a day at my work account. And it’s not like I’m signing up for services with this e-mail address—I only use it for work e-mails. So you have to wonder, where do they get these work e-mail addresses? It took me a little while to figure it out. I work in the affiliate marketing department for my company. So the people I work with are generally the get-rich-quick, make-a-fortune-from-home kind of guys. The kind of guys who would sell my e-mail address to spammers. Nothing says “I’m not satisfied with our business arrangement” like signing someone up for information about penis enlargement pills.

I just started making a list of some of the subject lines I receive in my inbox every day at work, but I couldn’t do it. They’re just so outrageously inappropriate that I couldn’t do it. Here’s a typical stream of e-mail consciousness:

• Our i-frame isn’t working!
• These posting instructions are wrong!
• Do you have a variable set aside for sub id tracking?
• I can make your penis larger!
• Anyone up for lunch?

Incidentally, if you want any designer watches or Russian brides, I can forward you a few e-mails.