Long has been my battle with spam here at Blog of Wonder. Between writing and rewriting my personalized spam filter and manually deleting the ones that slip through, I've done pretty good job of preventing comment spam. I hope that if my legit commenters ever hit the filter on a legit comment, they'll email me to let me know the details so I can tweak things.

But recently, two different types of comment spam have stumped me. Firstly, I've gotten a few spam comments on old old posts. As you may know, I've got rules in the server-side code which prevent comments on any topics not currently on the front page. But somehow, I've gotten 2 or 3 spam comments on blog posts from over a year ago. I don't know how in the heck that happens. I've just been manually deleting them, but the phenomenon perplexes me.

Secondly, an animal a bit more insidious than the last: manually-written comments which seem to pertain to the post I've written, and yet which are somewhat inane and truly contribute nothing. Normally, I'd just qualify these as stupid rather than as spam. But when they contain a link to a site obviously trying to boost its pagerank, a site which is by no means a personal site, it's got to be categorized as spam. This has happened 2 or 3 times now, all by the same guy. I left the most recent one simply as an example, although I removed the link to his site. Check out this comment by "register damage". See what I mean? What do you think?