I have two blogs, my personal blog and my technical blog. The technical blog is a small subset of the personal blog containing posts that are more likely to be of interest to the techie audience at weblogs.asp.net.

Lately, the comments in one post at weblogs.asp.net have been repeatedly spammed with sad little gems like the following:

• "not much on my mind right now"
• "I just don’t have anything to say , but shrug"
• "I’ve just been letting everything happen without me"
• "Basically nothing noteworthy happening right now, but eh"
• "My mind is like a void"

If you click the links above, you’ll find that I’m not the only one who’s getting this treatment. The spams are clearly generated by a bot, which is generating links to an enormous variety of randomly chosen sites, with no obvious com­mon­al­i­ty.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, I can find very few dis­cus­sions of this particular phenomenon, save Nihilist spam and Best Comment Spam Ever. It seems to have been the catalyst triggering PocketNow: Requiring Reg­is­tra­tion [to Post].

My personal blog is running dasBlog, which has a CAPTCHA im­ple­men­ta­tion, as well as some other anti-spam features. So far, I haven’t had a spam problem there, but perhaps I’m just flying under the spammers’ radar.

Brian Goldfarb recently sent mail to all the bloggers at weblogs.asp.net, detailing forth­com­ing changes and im­prove­ments (sorry, can’t find a public post). There was no specific mention of dealing with comment spam, alas.

I found the SixApart Guide to Comment Spam to be useful, if wordy and Movable Type-centric. They agree with Scott Mitchell on the Worth(lessness) of CAPTCHAs. And this summary of the problem of Comment Spam ain’t bad.