I have received my first bit of comment spam. I feel vindicated. You don't know you're a real website until you get some comment spam!

wtf is comment spam?

Comments on stories for websites are an excellent source of information. Sometimes there is garbage in there though, and you have to filter through it, but sometimes the best information from a given source is not in the actual article that the author wrote, but in the responses from the general public. My favorite is when a person tells a life story that illustrates the point of the article, or perhaps brings new illumination to unexplored areas.

Comments are also an excellent way for unscrupulous internet advertisers to promote whatever website they're trying to make money off of, as most comment sections of websites allow for hyper links and so forth.

One way to efficiently do this is to spam websites' comment forms. A shady programmer somewhere will create a computer bot that will interface with the comment form and automatically post links back to the various shady websites that the computer bot is programmed to promote. The reason 'captchas' (scrambled messages you have to type to verify your humanity) were invented was to differentiate human users from these kinds of 'bots'.

so why are you happy bots are posting pr0n spam on your site?

I originally made the comments form totally open so that anyone that wanted to comment would have low barriers of entry. I often think about commenting on other sites, but they usually make it a hassle, so I often don't bother.

However, that decision left me open to bots. The reason I'm excited that I got them is because it indicates that my site has enough exposure for one of those stupid programs to be able to find my site and start spamming it. Interestingly, it was only my favorite article on the site so far that attracted comment spam - good 'ol Georgey Ingram. It makes sense that his stench would attract other carrion feeders.

Yay for milestones!