Sunday, April 25, 2010

Is it just me?

Or should I say, "私がそう思っているだけでしょうか。/気のせいかな。"

Bailey and I have been blogging for a few years, and starting about six months ago, we both started getting comments in Japanese on both of our blogs. While neither of us can read Japanese, the comments always seemed to be different, from our admittedly non-professional analysis of the characters. The commenters' names were composed of 2 0r 3 of these characters, and the comments were usually 2-3 lines long, and ended in a really long ellipse, like this "......................................................."

And to be fair, the language may not be Japanese at all; it may be Korean, or Vietnamese, or another similar Asian language.

But I have run a bunch of them through the translator at dictionary.com, using every possible source language I could find on that site, and none of them translate to English.

It started with 1 or 2 comments per month on each blog. Now I am getting 1 or 2 a day, and Bailey gets 3-4 each week. And starting today, some of mine have dispensed with the foreign characters in the commenter's name, and now use our alphabet (albeit in nonsensical combinations).

I am just rejecting all these comments, and writing them off as spam. I am afraid that the ellipses might actually be a link to some sort of spammy page or virus, so I am just not letting them through. But I am really interested in hearing from you guys - is anyone else getting these, or are Bailey and I suddenly the toast of Asia?

And on a side note, I have actually had a lot of time for jewelry design and creation lately, and have finished some neat stuff, and have a lot of other partially finished projects (as usual). I am just horrible about taking the photos, uploading them, editing them, and posting them to my blog. I will try to do better.

I don't know what Bailey's excuse is. He does sleep a lot.

If anyone else is getting these weird comments, please tell me about it! Thanks!

EDITED TO ADD: Bailey & I are both still getting these comments, and I have been able to determine definitely that there is embedded HTML in the ellipses. Something strange is definitely going on....

EDITED YET AGAIN, TO ADD: Oh, goodie. They contain embedded links to PORN.
I will try to cut and paste the non-porny part here - the sender of today's comment is:
瑜吟, but unfortunately the entire comment (besides being in Japanese, apparently) is just a clickable link, and I can't highlight it to copy and paste here. But merely hovering over the comment showed some really interesting-sounding sites. I'll just be sure and check those out. And so will my dog.

Good grief.