Mission. F*cking. Accomplished.

You've probably seen this xkcd about coercing positive spammer behavior. Lately, it seems that this is starting to happen on my blog, and unfortunately it's not as rosy as xkcd hoped. I've gotten a surge of spammy comments linking to the usual weight-loss and drug sites, but the actual comments are pretty on-point:

• "Very impressive. It is not look like an amateur design. So, what about the expert's design. I'm sure it will be more wonderful." - comment on White House Photoshop Disaster
• "The main problem I see when people try to diet is that they try to change their entire diet. It seems the first step people can take that is simple is just to control portions. Just because you order the BigMac meal doesn't mean you have to eat every bite of it." - comment on How I Ate One Million Good Calories and Discovered My Personal Fountain of Youth

... and so on. They're inane comments, but if it weren't for the spammy links in the metadata, as a moderator I wouldn't really have any complaint about them.

I have several theories how this is happening.

• The spammer has developed a clever site that gives unwitting people incentives to write comments on blog posts (e.g., in exchange for seeing another porn image), and then uses their responses to post the spam links on my site (and thousands of other sites like mine). This is just another variation on an old hack that breaks CAPTCHAs.
• The spammer has developed a Markov text generator that steals comments from other, similar articles and adapts them. I don't think this is the case because I've searched for snippets of the comment text on the web and haven't found anything.
• (Shudder) The spammer is paying or otherwise coercing real, English-speaking humans to read articles and comment on them. I don't believe this could possibly be cost-effective.

No matter what the cause, I've switched comments to be quarantined by default.