Spam Spreads to Comments Section

We have
been hearing dire warnings for some time now, particularly from our friends
in the Thursday
Night Blogger’s Group, about the looming disaster which
is Comment Spam.

Oh no, we thought, not content with rendering email all but unusable
(side note: despite having multiple layers of protection, firewalls,
spam filters, University-wide spam killers, etc., we are still getting
more spam than real mail. To make matters worse, several crucial messages
have been mistakenly filed as Junk, requiring at least once a day a complete
review of the Junk mailbox to see if anything important has been misfiled!)
Spammers are taking aim at our Blog’s unenDOWed comments section!

Then we thought, hey that might not be so bad. We admit to feeling slighted
by the sparcity of comments on Dowbrigade News; maybe Comments Spam would
at least make it LOOK like our readers cared enough to tell us how they
felt about our posts. We imagined a comments section full of pithy comments
on Penis Enlargers and Two-Day PhD Programs, invisible unless someone
actually tried to READ the comments…..

Well, here is the first
bonafide example of the phenomena we have seen,
and its not pretty.  This comment was posted to the Berkman
Center main blog site. Has anyone else been seeing these?