How long do they last, those boilerplate texts that spam commenters use in their attempted blog postings? We have already seen that many of them seem to be picked from circulating manuals of spam commentry, very much like the standard letter-writers that used to be popular in the Victorian era. But how long do those circulating manuals keep circulating? We just received one comment that may give us some clue if we interpret it correctly:

Hi there! Someone in my Myspace group shared this website with us so I came to check it out. I’m definitely enjoying the information.

This indicates that some of our spam-commenting manuals date from the Pleistocene era of the Internet.

Perhaps we ought to speak in terms of half-lives. Like radioactive materials, the spam-commenting manual is probably very active when it is new, but then gradually settles down, only firing off an occasional gamma ray to let us know it still has some life left in it.

At any rate, Dr. Boli really hated to mark this comment as spam. It felt like smashing a valuable antique. Eventually he settled on presenting the text here, shorn of any hyperlinks that might mislead the unwary, and deleting the comment itself.