Dear Asian Spammers

Look, fellas, I understand that you want to make your mark. I understand that there's a cultural divide, and your intricate characters may disguise any number of profound messages that are simply lost on an American who's never studied a non-Romantic language. And I really appreciate the effort you've made to bridge that language gap with pithy English phrases that might fill a particularly brief fortune cookie note.

But I really have to ask: what is your deal? What do you hope to accomplish? What is your goal in leaving a bunch of unintelligible characters followed by a long string of URL-periods in the comment section? Your comments never stick around here for more than a few hours, and I can pretty much guarantee that no one clicks on the links, so what's your purpose? Why waste the energy and effort? Even if it's all done by bots, someone has to spend time programming those bots. What do you hope to gain in marking your territory across the blogohedron? Where's the payoff? I get the people who e-mail me about Apache Chief-ing my genitals and selling me cheap imported Miraclo, they're trying to sell something using the Internet's equivalent of junk mail. I even get the English-language comment spam that tries to be just vague enough that you'll click the name and end up at some sinister website. But spam in a foreign language that, thanks to the string of URL-periods, is obviously spam? That I just don't get. It seems like the goal of spam has been, for many years, to sneak under the radar and disguise its spamminess, using subject headers like "Re: your letter" and so forth. Why post such obvious, ostentatious spam? Is it a graffiti/status thing? If so, isn't that kind of lame, when you could be using actual skill to actually tag something in the actual world, where a bot can't do it for you?

I'm trying to open up a dialogue here, Asian Spammers. I'd really like to understand your motivations. Feel free to post your comments here; I'll make sure to keep them for posterity.

Regards,
Tom