A Byte of Nonsense

Hey there! What do you think of the new server?
Oh… Well that was clearly worth the hassle.

This weekend I moved the blog to a new home, and while nothing’s changed cosmetically (yet), the new server gives me a bit more control. As you might know, the Ben-A-Ball blog began on Blogger in 2005, moved over to JustHost  in 2011,  and then quickly over to Digital Pacific in the same year after finding that JustHost was doing a shocking job at keeping the site online.

Now the site is with Crucial, a company which was recently purchased by Digital Pacific…
Which is one of the reasons I went with them. Digital Pacific are fantastic, so I feel less bad for leaving them since they own the company I’ve moved to. My move wasn’t at all one of anger or disappointment, my move was purely strategic.

Luckily the site moved over without a hitch, less than a minute of downtime. In fact, the only ‘people’ who may have really noticed any disruptions to the “Ben-A-Ball Experience” would be the… spammers, which is what I wanted to touch upon in this post. You wouldn’t know it, but this site actually gets a lot of traffic. The problem is that the traffic it receives is either trying to hack the admin-password through brute-forcing OR posting comments that make absolutely no sense, so they can try to sneak advertising into the comment section. It wasn’t until I started transferring the site over to the new server, that I realised how many spam comments had been picked up by my spam filter…

Most of them are just spamming links to online stores… but I’ve noticed a growing trend that I’m a bit suspicious about:

wholesale jerseys from china

Bills, AFL commissioner, ‘s Davis, took off the gloves as well as the AFL aggressively pursued V. NY CITY POLICE DEPT., ET AL.06M9 LOGUE, GEORGE V COAKLEY, MARTHA, ET AL.06M10 DEGLACE, CARLOS the Memphis team logo is confusing. When teams change logo.

I find sports commentary confusing enough as it is, but this comment, which linked to a website where you can buy, you guessed it, ‘wholesale jerseys from china,’ really takes the mark when it comes failing to communicate in English. You copy that into Google and you’ll be linked to hundreds of other blogs who have been spammed by this ambiguous and incoherent comment.
It’s all over the internet, and predominantly on websites that have nothing to do with sports, or jerseys.

What does it all mean? There are so many questions to ask. Who is Bill? Why did the AFL pursue the New York Police Department? What does ‘ET AL.06M9’ and ‘ET AL.06M10’ mean? Who on Earth is Carlos, and why does he find the Memphis team logo confusing? Or have they recently changed their logo, and now he finds it confusing?

However, the most important question to ask is: What the flying f*#$ does this have to do with wholesale jerseys from china?!

It feels like I’m reading a comment generated by Google’s Dream Machine. My brain is trying to make sense of not only, a mash of completely unrelated sentences, but the logic and mindset that went into concocting it. Why? WHAT PURPOSE DOES IT SERVE? Why would I see a comment like this on a website and think: “YES, Jerseys from China, just what I was looking for.”

Has my blissful sport-free existence resulted in a blindness to the wealthy expanse of the jersey industry?
Are wholesale jerseys some kind of rare commodity that I was unaware of?
Have people found a way to fill their cars up with jerseys instead of petrol?

*Sigh*

Regardless… this comment made up 90% of the spam comments in my filter. For whatever reason, someone decided that this was marketing gold, and started spamming every website it could with it. I actually think that the comment is really written the way it is so that the owners of the spam-software can detect how many sites their spam has spread to. It’s complete dribble that no one would ever write, so by searching Google they can find how many successful advertisements have made their way onto the internet. The title of the comments with the link to their site is the only part they care about people reading.

This comment is the same. It doesn’t relate to jerseys at all, it can be found on countless websites and it makes no sense.

cheap nfl jerseys 2013

design company, you need to evaluate your own requirements. You need to find out the aims March 2, 1982. He attended Findlay High School in Findlay, Ohio. Roethlisberger was the captain of detailed controls that would allow me to firewall off this devi

A bunch of sentences, slapped together and posted on as many websites as possible in the hopes that someone is in desperate need of a jersey… Ah, the internet.

Until next time!

Ben,