Rosio Pavoris

There’s nothing inherently strange about getting spam. Statistics show that between 99 and 94% of all blog comments are spam. I get between five and several hundred spam comments a day (Akismet has stopped 6,981 of them so far, and I received at least twice that before I bothered to use Akismet).
There isn’t even anything particularly special about spam comments getting past my filters; Akismet stops nearly all of them, but every few days one or two will still get past. Most of those are stopped by my second filter, but even so, some get through with some frequency.

However, I wanted to share with you this particular comment I received earlier today:

I’m 8 years old and I’m doing a summer report on a nautilus. I love our picture of one eating a crab and I’m going to use it in my report, if that’s okay. I love your other pictures too of pandas but I’m not doing a report on pandas.
From, Emily in California

That’s cute, isn’t it? And it is, indeed, a comment on a post that includes a picture of a nautilus eating a crab. And I have indeed posted pictures of pandas on several occasions. And I know for a fact there is at least one Emily in California, so it’s plausible there could be another one, one that is eight years old.
But I don’t think eight-year-olds manage luxury and resort travel websites.

It’s a brave new world of spam out there, kids!
Whether this is a sophisticated new spambot (unlikely) or an actual manual spam comment (likely, since the e-mail address used is the personal address of one of the writers at that website and her husband), I decided it’s worth preserving. I’ve stripped the URL, though, because even I am not that nice.

(Of course, there’s still a small chance this is a legitimate comment and young Emily was forced to use the URL by her parents. Which is actually probably worse.)

(Also, just for the record, AFAIK, all of the animal pictures I post are either in the public domain, or free to use. Of course, since I get many of them from /an/, that can occasionally be hard to verify. Still, for a loli summer report, I’m sure it’d be alright to use them.)