Schinckel.net

I checked my blog comments this morning, and got quite excited. Normally I get a comment or two per week, but today there were 11 new comments. And they were for a variety of different posts, ones from recently and some from quite a while ago. I clicked on the Comment arrow in the Dashboard, and was intrigued to see they were all meaningless jumled letters. 11 comments, all spam, all with 2 links in them, all not pointing at anything in particular. I mass-deleted them, but probably should have inspected them a little more closely first, just to see what the story with them was. I did notice they all came from different IP addresses, all used reasonable first names as the Commenter Name, and all had the same set of character in them: erdfcv. A quick Google on this provided not many clues. There is a user on immigration.com forums, and an eBay user, and a whole lot of foreign (non-English) language pages. Chinese, Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, and Korean, to name a few. Then I looked at the keyboard.

qwERt
 asDFg
  zxCVb    

I’m such a tool, this is not a random set of strings, but a common(ish) method of coming up with a set of letters. Like QWERTY but less recognisable.