Fortunately, the Akismet plugin for WordPress catches just about all of it, and I've never seen a false positive yet.

For the past six months or so, though, I've noticed a trend: an anonymous poster will leave an innocuous comment, like "Nice post" or "Interesting," with a unique and unusual commenter name, but no links. But then, almost immediately after that comment is posted I get a deluge of spam comments (which of course Akismet catches).

As an experiment, I tried deleting the innocuous comment that preceded the spam flood, and the amount of comment spam immediately dropped off to normal levels. I've done this three times now, and seen the same drop-off each time.

My current hypothesis is that spammers are leaving these innocuous comments as "beacons," which spam bots then look for in search of "live" blogs that they can post their spam to.

Have any other bloggers noticed this sort of trend, or am I just bonkers?