Language Log

I last posted about spam comments on New Language Log in September, when the spam queue was nearing 9,000 items. Now it's over 77,000, and there have been waves of spam of many different types. We do get spam comments that take a moment's thought to discard. To start with, they're grammatical (while in the old days, many of the spam comments were entertainingly ungrammatical), but then they betray their spamminess by a cluster of properties: they are comments on postings from some time before; they have no real content, but merely say something congratulatory (like "Great site!"); and the URI they provide is to a commercial site (sometimes this is immediately obvious, but sometimes it takes some checking).

I may perhaps have commented before that I am a firm believer in the pessimistic principle that every upgrade is a downgrade. So when I saw on December 22 a message from our technical staff at the University of Edinburgh saying that on the following day the Unix servers would be taken down "for the installation of security patches and general maintenance", I naturally felt a chill like the coldness of the grave.

Someone using the moniker "Tarlach" tried to post a number of comments last night. This one, related to Chris Potts' post "Probably they shouldn't", was typical:

Actual speaks of language have no problems with antecedents. They are completly un-noteworthy, and I don't understand why people make posts about these un-noteworthy language events on here. If Obama's slogan was "Yes, Fred can!" with no common perception of who the hell Fred is, that would be noteworthy.

Due to a scheduled power interruption in the building where our server is located, Language Log will be unavailable between approximately 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. tomorrow, Dec. 20. (That would be 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. GMT, if I've done the arithmetic right.)

[Update 12:07 12/20: Or maybe not — in fact, things seemed to go down in the wee hours of the morning, and they're back as now, which is noon, and might be down later. Anyhow, everything seems to be OK…]

Earlier today, someone calling himself (?) Baishui submitted this comment on Victor Mair's post Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft:

My comments were deleted twice here. Apparently, someone is offended by me saying 'this incident shows how ignorant the West (and its academics) are of the non-Western world'. What pettiness!

I deleted this comment, just as I had deleted the same individual's first attempt, which consisted only of a one-sentence indictment of Western academics, and the second attempt, which added the accusation of censorship.

In an attempt to maintain a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio in the comments section, I'll continue to be skeptical of comments that lack specific and relevant content. To put this skepticism into context, though, you need to understand something about how comments work in a standard WordPress blog.

For some weeks now I have been assigned to the Financial Good News Desk here at Language Log Plaza. It took me longer than it should have done for me to realize that this was just some sort of practical joke aimed at making sure I did not write anything, apparently because of pressure from the office of the Vice President of the United States (because of posts like this one, I suppose). I eventually applied for a transfer, and have now been assigned to the Research Survey Department. So I have to send out surveys. Please answer the questions below in your own time despite the considerable difficulties with format and the obscurity of the questions, and return by email at our convenience to surveys@research.languagelog.com, where an automatic system will use it to generate data entirely for our benefit rather than yours.

Because of scheduled work on power lines in the building where the Language Log server sits, we'll be off the net between midnight and about 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 28.

A bit of frivolity…

As the spam queue on New Language Log approaches 9,000 items (rapidly), I offer four comments from my favorite spammer, which combine the congratulatory content of so much spam commentary with astonishing syntax:

I is pleasantly amazd! Thank!!!

This simply prodigy!

There was merrily!

The Good lad an author! I much like site!

There's more, of course. This particular spammer hasn't been around for a while, so that the minute or so I take each day to mark items as spam and to de-spam misclassified items  is more boring than it was for a while.

Note to commenters: if you put a URI "in the clear" (printed out, rather than inserted into an "a" tag) in your comment, Akismet is likely to mark your comment as spam (because one variety of spam comments consists almost entirely of lists of such URIs). I sometimes do that myself, when the URI is the main content of my comment; but then I expect to have to de-spam my own comment.

Please note: Mark's passing along of today's Cathy comic should be seen before reading this post.                                                                                                                               We get amazingly few complaints about the organization and management here at Language Log Plaza, perhaps because currently we have no surcharges or extra hidden costs. In case you haven’t noticed, we actually have no charges at all. So we can’t be accused of having middlemen, speculators, price-fixing, lack of transparency, add-on fuel consumption charges, or less than full disclosure of our accounting procedures. In fact, it appears that we don’t even have any of these. Come to think about it, compared with utilities companies or, ugh, airlines, or the websites of many journals, Language Log can't be accused of being very cost conscious.

My posting on glass as a technical term, with both mass and count uses, elicited an off-topic thread on myriad, which I'll reproduce below, after some (more) discussion of the Language Log comments policy.

The thread began with this query from kip on 8/1 at 9:58 a.m. (times are U.S. Eastern Time):

Does anyone else have a mass/collective distinction problem with the word "myriad"? I see uses like "the movie has myriad problems" and in my head I change it to "the movie has a myriad of problems" because that's what sounds right to me. Maybe I'm alone in that though…

So what's the problem with this comment?

Did you know that Language Log has a comments policy? Have you read it? If not, go and read it now, and if so, refresh your memory; look at the bar at the top of the main page, where it says

Home   About   Comments policy

and click on "Comments policy". There you will find the instruction

Be relevant. As bloggers, we write about whatever we want to. As a commenter, you should comment on the contents of the post you're commenting on. If you want to write about something else, do it on your own blog.

Commenters have violated this injunction again and again (for reasons I think I understand). The comments policy goes on to say

Comments that violate these guidelines will be deleted. Repeat offenders may be banned.

but in fact we've been extraordinarily tolerant of errant comments, even allowing comments that explicitly introduce topics that have nothing to do with the topic of the original posting. These are the most flagrant violations, but there are more subtle ones.

I've recently done a bit of site-administration hacking — more details are below, but the bottom line is that URLs like http://languagelog.org now do the right thing. Despite this progress, a few problems remain. There's one problem in particular where suggestions from readers with expertise in website administration would be appreciated.

The best part of blogging is the conversation. From the beginning, some of our most interesting content has come from readers' emailed suggestions and reactions, or from online interactions with other bloggers. However, our experience with online comments has generally been a negative one.

Since our new WordPress software makes it easier to keep down spam, and also offers some new options for managing comments and commenters, we'll be trying some new experiments with comments over the next few weeks.

As a result, we can look forward to conversations like this one:

Because of our focus on language, we'll benefit from the added energy that led (for example) to this outpouring of 3,429 deeply-felt and well-informed linguistic opinions. And since language connects with every aspect of human biology, culture and society, we can also expect to be enlightened by lengthy ideological manifestos on topics connected to our posts by gossamer threads of associative thought.

I can't wait.