As any fule kno, if you have a blog, you’re going to get comment spam.

This basically three main flavours: spam comments which contains hyperlinks to porn sites, spam comments which contain hyperlinks to gambling sites, and spam comments which contain hyperlinks to pharmaceutical sites.

Of course, every now and again, you’ll get some non-hyperlinked spam where some fourteen year olds discover your site and from their school (because you can track down the IP addresses you know, kids) attempt to have a flame war with each other on one of your old posts, with numerous references to donkey genitalia.

*sigh*. It really is neither big nor clever, and it’s fairly easy to stop, given that there’s a limited IP range they are using.

Now anyone with a blog will either use some sort of spam filter, not allow comments at all, or will spend most of their time deleting comment spam. I normally have a quick glance at the comment spam that arrives in my filters before deleting it, just to check it’s not blocking genuine people, and most of the time I find I’ve never even heard of the drugs that are trying to be sold. Fortunately, as my mother is a pharmacist, I can ask her.

This does now and again lead to some confusion, particularly when I’ve asked about something like Levitra, which turns out to be something used to treat erectile disfunction.

Honest, Mam, people were sending comments to my site about it..

It has to be said, that a number of the spam comments are funny. Or at least they would be if I didn’t have to waste my time deleting ‘em. Normally, they’ll just jump straight in with something like this:

Hey, Nice Site! Take a look at mine:

Everything you wanted to know about Arranging A Mortage or Online Gambling.

Spammer

Except, obviously the spam comments would contain hyperlinks. I mean, it’s just not subtle, is it?

But despite that being a legitimate warning to any parents thinking of setting up a blog for their youngsters — if your kids are responsible for the commenting, they’ll be cleaning out an awful lot of links and being exposed to an awful lot of sexually explicit terms (and if they’re daft enough to follow the links, sites). Be very wary!

But the best one, the best one yet, was one I cleared out earlier today that was advertising where I could find:

Pokemon pornSpammer

Pokémon? Isn’t that that aggravating Japanese card game/ cartoon/ film/ merchandising cash-in? Um … yes it is. So Pokémon porn is presumably pornography featuring Pokémon characters?

Are there really people out there who fantasise about Pokémon characters? It would appear so. I’m gobsmacked. Dumbfounded. And somewhat puzzled. I’ll leave it to Sir Arthur to sum up how I feel about this…

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.Sir Arthur Eddington