Spam comments in esperanto?

Most of the comments to this blog are - unfortunately - spam. WordPress’s Akismet filters them out and I periodically review and delete them all. I don’t know why I bother, but once I had a real comment black-listed, so I keep making the effort. It is also semi-interesting to see how the spam attacks changed over time from automatic to semi-manual looking efforts.

Today’s collection had a comment that gave me a double take. It went like this:

-strange junk-

Kiel

vi fartas?

-spam links-

G^is revido

Which is obviously esperanto for ‘How are you’ and ‘See you later’ (though I prefer x notation myself in Gxis revido).

So, what happened there? I can see three options:

  1. Esperanto speaking spammer who decided to switch the ‘hello’ text upon seeing an Esperanto category in my blog
  2. Automatic software that looked for all blogs that mentioned Esperanto with hopes that the ‘less frequent’ language will not trigger spam filters
  3. Some sort of automatic spam algorithm picking out greetings based on the content of the blog; if that’s the case, the fact that somebody bothered adding Esperanto to their list is - in a perverse way - a cause to celebrate

I don’t think I will ever find out what happened, unless the original spammer comes back and comments on this post with the answer. Still, it is a food for thought.