Balfour, Boswell, Castlegar, Nelson: ‘Cuckoo’ spammers say the darndest things
By Adrian Barnes
You may have logged onto one of our sites over the last year or so and seen the occasional article that clearly didn’t come out of the fervid fingertips of our own writers and editors. Articles or blog posts with titles like “WATCH LIVE ESP IPAD BUY NOW SUPER DEAL NEW SHOES”. These posts are created by shrieking ether-ghosts who hack our sites in order to attract hits for their nefarious commercial ventures in much the same way that a cuckoo steals the nest of another, more industrious bird, in order to hatch its own eggs. Sigh.
Welcome to the Internet.
When one of their ‘eggs’ hatches our sites are flattened by an avalanche of visitors drawn to links embedded in these stories. Occasionally this has resulted in our sites crashing, though never for too long thanks to the “firm and resolute” actions of our webmaster, David Livingstone.
We respond as best we can. We’ve tried software solutions, constant vigilance (taking new posts down as soon as they pop up in an attempt to convince the cuckoos that their endeavors are pointless. Our latest idea has been to create a local knowledge-based new account verification question, “please name 4 towns in the Kootenays”. We also ask people to write a short, personalizing statement about themselves. Has this stopped the cuckoos? Of course not! But it has made life more amusing.
Somewhere in China a spammer did a little research and came up with a list of towns that all our spammers now use. “Balfour, Boswell, Castlegar, Nelson”: it sounds like, and should be, a local skipping rope rhyme:
Balfour, Boswell, Castlegar, Nelson
Everybody here has got their belts on
Rossland, Ymir, Salmo, Trail
It’s time to skip to old Fruitvale
Or something like that.
The bios are the best, though. The stone-cold favourite among our editors is this one:
"I'm Jaime D. Ashby, freelance photographer and write about neutral calamity. Submarine photography is my best chaise."
“Neutral calamity! Submarine photography!” Now we’ve moved from skipping rhymes to high end poetry! Mr. “Ashby”s words sound, to my ears, like Bob Dylan lyrics from circa 1965 (add the nasality yourselves)”:
“She’s a neutral calamity, writes about submarine photography”
Or take the ballad of poor Ricardo Smith, who wrote to us that “I am a Singer. Wanted To Make Some Special For the Prople.”
Slightly more coherent is Michele Games of PARK AVENUE NEW YORK who “has combined an entrepreneurial flair with a fierce commitment to excellence – not to mention whipsmart memory and both fingertip and in depth knowledge of how companies can best recruit and retain top talent. Michele James is a woman that the best companies want to work with. CASTLEGAR, NELSON, BALFOUR, BOSWELL.”
Honoured to have you on board, Ms. Park Avenue!
Finally, and perhaps most poignantly, there’s poor old Neil Roberts, whose life appears to have beens something of a disappointment: “I'm an Instructor of Economics Department at Langara College. I tried to write about economical and financial policy.” Oh, God, I’m actually teary-eyed over this miserable little missive!
Sorry to say, but none of these cuckoos have been able to activate their memberships yet, although it does take us a fair amount of time to vet the submissions. We’re pleased to report that, for the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spam-free. Hopefully these cuckoos will give up on us and flutter off to greener pastures. It’s hard to imagine dozens of poorly-paid hacks, chained to laptops in Shanghai and Belgrade, so desperate to leave their mark on a Lone Sheep website, but the world is a strange place and it’s getting stranger every day.
But whenever the taxing realities of web news production get us down, we just chant those familiar words and smiles return to our faces...
Balfour, Boswell, Castlegar, Nelson...