The other day, my friends over at criticalbeatdowns.com emailed me because they were entering their first stages of dealing with comment spam, and I had previously been forced to deal with this problem. I solved it by installing MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen (which kicked much ass) but since upgrading to MovableType 3.2, have just been relying on the stock install which has had much of the functionality of MT-Blacklist rolled in.

Coincidentally, at about this time I got my first comment from a "Lamar Cole." I junked it; it made it past the spam filter but seemed to be a complete non-sequitur to the topic of the post so I assumed it was spam. However, it didn't have any real characteristics of comment spam besides the non-sequitur text - i.e., no links to porn or poker sites. Just recently I got another one, with the same text. Again, no other characteristics of spam. This raised my curiosity a bit - a quick Google search turns up thousands of comments by Lamar Cole. Almost all of these bear short messages about love - the two that were sent to this site said "Love is a path to the heart that knows its own way."

So the big question is who is Lamar Cole, and why is he posting these messages on random entries on random blogs across the web? There appears to be no overt spamminess - no links to raise Google PageRank, no trying to get linkbacks to a central site. The only commercial connection appears to be that some of the comments have this text - "Love is two people sipping Coca-Cola from the same straw on a warm sunny day." There even appears to be a potential working email address (I haven't tried it yet, but it's lcolej@yahoo.com). Is it just someone who is trying to spread some goodwill and cheesy sentiment across the big, bad web, or is there some weird level of calculation behind all of this that I don't grok? I'm not so curious as to try to track down this person, but if anyone else has any information, I'd be interested in hearing it...