My New Favorite Piece of Spam

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Spam is woefully a fact of life on this internet of ours. You can try as hard as you like to reduce it , but you can never completely stop it. When you open yourself to recieving messages, you necessarily open yourself to messages that you don’t want. Your friends, I hope, will be considerate about what they send you, but the world as a whole will not.

I checked my contact form messages this morning. As usual, it was only spam (I think I’ve only gotten two genuine messages since I set my contact form up. Thank you Rohit and jayjay!). But there was one that caught my eye. It said:

Gwhduwdjiwhduwh uhiwdjiwjdeufhu jikodwfiewfiwjdjw jidwjosqdijwifi jiwdowidqoiowufeugewi uiwjdiwurfuwyruewiai fwhuwhwhfuwhduwijdw

I’ve seen so many ads, so much marketing copy that was soulless slop even before LLMs¹. But this, this is simple gibberish. It’s not trying to sell me anything. It’s not underpinned by a cynical and anxious worldview that unless you spend every waking moment trying to get ahead of everyone else you will be left behind. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Here’s some interesting facts. Interesting to me at least. I have three different websites. All of them have a contact form. The other two are more conventional kinds of personal websites than this one. The kind that functions as a business card more than anything. Despite not doing much to “optimize” them, they get a fair bit of traffic, mostly bots. And I get a lot of messages through them, again, all bots. Many more messages, in fact, than through this site. That’s what’s interesting to me.

This one you’re on right now is by far the most frequently updated one and the one that I promote the most. And it’s the one that gets the most real people visiting it. It doesn’t get any fewer bot visitors, but they don’t go for the contact form as much. I have no idea what the difference is.

It does all make me wonder if having a contact form is even worth it. Maybe I’ll just go back to having an email address instead (if you’re reading this via RSS you can already see that address right at the bottom). Then again, it doesn’t take me a whole lot of effort to keep it running. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter either way. I’m just thinking out loud.

This post wasn’t originally meant to be thinly-veiled begging for comments (again) , but sometimes that’s just where you end up. I mostly don’t plan or outline my posts. I just pick a topic that grabs my attention and riff on it for a while. And maybe that sometimes leads to self indulgent rambling, but that’s okay. Besides, if you cleared all the self indulgent rambling off the internet, there would not be a whole lot left.

So what’s your favorite bit of spam you’ve gotten? Was it hilariously nonsensical? Wildly off-target? Accidentally genuinely useful? There’s such a wide world of spam out there, I no I’ve only seen a tiny piece of it.