Liar, Liar, Code On Fire!

Look, anonymous spambot - it's bad enough that you're a 'bot that's leaving spam comments on my little-read blog, but do you have to outright lie while you're at it?

It's a shame you don't have a donate button! I'd definitely donate to this brilliant blog!

You're a fucking liar, spambot.  Nothing more than a filthy lying whorebot.
How do I know?  Because I do have a donate button.
Punk-ass liar.
(Also, calling this a "brilliant blog" is just piling lie on top of lie.)

The What Now?

Every so often I skim through the comments that Blogger tags as spam just to see if there's anything legitimate in there.
There never is, but I do invariably find myself puzzled by what is in there.
Sure, there's the standard links to Web pages featuring sexy girls and for cheap prescriptions and whatnot, but there's a lot of random comments about US politics.
One of the more common ones - the same four or five comments keep appearing and reappearing verbatim - is some airy nonsense about the transformative effect of the Tea Party, but by far the most puzzling one is the comment referring to John McCain - McLame, as the comment spam puts it - being a "Manchurian Candidate."
Given how rarely I mention politics here, it goes without saying that the comments are apropos of nothing contained within the posts to which they're attached, and the comments don't actually contain any links, so I'm just puzzled as to why they exist.
Clearly it's the work of some sort of spambots, but what, exactly, are the comments themselves intended to accomplish, given that they contain no links?  Just some sort of random comment thread crawler that posts a comment in the hopes that it will receive a response, at which point it will then spam it further, this time with actual links?  Is it a bot set up by some comment troll who's feeling around for some thread in which he - of course it would be a he - can get people riled up with some sort of inflammatory rhetoric?
I just don't get it.

Failed Experiment

Over the weekend I decided to try an experiment to see if I could increase the number of comments I get on posts.
Typing in the letters that appear in the word verification is, apparently, the hardest thing ever - or, at least, more trouble than it's worth just to be able to comment on something I wrote (or drew) - so I actually turned off the word verification requirement.
The experiment was to see if this would increase the number of spam comments I got by an unacceptable amount. If, after some time with the word verification turned off, all I saw was the odd bit of spam here and there, I'd leave it off.
...
I was almost immediately inundated by spam comments.
Oddly enough, most of them were on a single post from over four years ago. I realize that automated spambots make leaving comment spam effortless, with little or no cost, making even the most infrequent success (i.e. someone actually clicking on the link(s) included in the comment) disproportionately profitable, but spamming a 4 year-old post on a blog with as little traffic as this one? Yeah, I can't see that ever paying off.
In any case, Blogger has a built-in system for detecting comment spam that seems to work pretty well, so none of the spam comments actually showed up on the blog, as they were awaiting my approval. So Threshold itself wasn't actually getting spammed.
I, however, was, since I receive an e-mail notification whenever someone leaves a comment.
There isn't really any way that I could filter my e-mail to differentiate between legitimate comments and spam comments, and I like being notified when someone leaves a comment - with the word verification, turned on 99% of the time they're legitimate, non-spam comments - so the only option that was available to me if I was going to leave word verification off and not get my inbox spammed - turning off e-mail notifications - didn't appeal to me.
Now, if I regularly got dozens of (real) comments a day, I'd probably turn the notifications off anyway, in which case I could go ahead and turn off word verification.
But given the small number of comments I get, right now, seeing a notification in my inbox is kind of a treat. Would the amount of spam I get be offset by real comments left by real people who have simply been waiting for commenting to be a little simpler if I left word verification off, and would the total volume make the notifications superfluous?
Given the amount of traffic this blog gets, I doubt it.
So unless there are masses of people who are willing to face that onerous word verification just one time in order to leave me a comment telling me that they would comment regularly if only they didn't have to go through the backbreaking labor involed in typing in an extra five characters to leave a comment, it seems that word verification is here to say, and the word verification-free system was a failed experiment.

I Don't Want You Accepting Comnments From That Boy From The Wrong Side Of The Blogosphere

Check out the latest post on Slacktivist:

The Good News: Typepad has revamped it's spam filters for comments.
The Bad News: It's now classifying lots of legitimate comments as spam -- sort of the spam-filter equivalent of lupus.
I'm trying to figure out what I can do to tweak this. They've changed the comment-editing interface (unannounced and without instructions), so I'll see if I can navigate that to make this work better. My apologies for the infuriating inconvenience (particularly to those of you whom Typepad seems especially to dislike -- Ecks, Scott, Jon, Geds, Cyllan and Mrs. & Mr. cjmr, among others).

That's right, baby. You don't want me coming around and leaving comments. I'm too real. Typepad just can't deal with that.