To you both, when the respective platform and plug -in are ready, by all means come drop some links as it sounds like both exercises will be extremely relevant and useful; plus that is what building online relationships and blog communities are all about!

1. Is the commenter commenting on an old post? Often spammers target an older post, particularly if their keywords match up with the keywords of the post.

2. Little of a plug here, but I’m putting some finishing touches to a plugin I call InComment (there’s a version of it on my actual blog, but I’m making it compatible for Wordpress 2.9). Basically it drops a cookie when people enter the site based on the referrer. It’s not perfect (if somebody’s using some software such as Comment Kahuna it won’t show as such), but you can see if people search on Google for phrases such as keyword +”Top Commenters” + “wordpress” +”Leave a Comment” -”Comments Closed”, or using search engines such as comment hunt (which I change one letter when referring to it in not so polite public ). Anyway, it helps finding out true intentions of commenters

I won`t drop a link because that defeats the object of the discussion (did you see what i did there Mr Spammer? I am back on a site that holds topic discussions that have an interest to me but i still chose not to post a link!)

Now i am guilty as the next man/woman for not commenting often enough on the blogs that i care about, but for the purposes of my travels around the blogosphere i wander far and wide.

But as a small business owner it is all about getting to know the community for your industry that you are in and participate.

Sooner or later you will find that you will be sought out/blogged about/referenced or even get a highly coveted link “within the content” of your competitors site, ok they may be rare but you see where i am going with this.

If you disagree with me blame Nichola, she started this, no seriously if you disagree with me say why.

You’ve touched on one of my favourite activities and a really important point. Once a new blogger/small business blogger gets a feel for the borderline spam, reviewing and trashing spam comments can actually be quite a fun activity. As Dean has said some of the comments can be so irrelevent and ridiculous, you have to raise a chuckle.

We recently got some rather well crafted spam on an all female blog that I write for. The comment itself was difficult to call, but the comment bot/spammer had started off with “great post bro’” – to an all female blog crew!!!

Some of these comments are brief one liners in the guise of having Yahoo/Bing (YaBing?) bots crawl their “look at me links”.

There is of course the one liners of those that have been hovering on the fringe of your blog and maybe testing the water for fear of being singled out for their reaction.

Some may never comment and that`s fine too, as long as they take value away because in the long run that word of mouth or link drop on their travels elsewhere may bring more readers.

For the scummy end, the lazy arse spammers with “buy [insert product name here]“. WTF? At which point in your dilluded little minds gave you the brainfart to think that creating or signing up to an automated commenting system?

I am a big advocate of “dofollow” in blog comments mainly because i know i am capable of moderating those comments enough to know who adds value.

I best shut up or create a post on the subject otherwise i will get no work done.

This was supposed to be a “hello! just popping in to read the latest” comment.