What's with all the trivial link spam?
DanielBMarkham: On my blog I'm getting comment spam without any links as well. The usual stuff like "Great work! Plan to come back often!" but there's no link to Joe's Sex Shop or anything -- just a bogus email address and fake name.I used to think it was just poor comments, but it only happens on certain pages, which aren't at the top of my most popular list.My theory is that the bots are working in waves -- first identify easy targets, then slowly exploit them. I wouldn't be surprised if the botnet guys are using Mechanical Turk-type operations just to work the CAPTCHAs and get valid logins for later use.It used to be you could make generalizations about the bot wars. Now, with possibly millions of programmers out there with nothing to do but try to work the system? The complexity and nuance of attacks are several orders of magnitude greater than just five years ago. I'm not sure any kind of sweeping statement catches what's going on, except: there are a lot of entities on the web that are looking for doors -- any kind of doors. Once they find them, it may be months or years before they are ever used.