For those of you who run a blog, this might be of interest. Someone posted a comment on my blog with a fairly unique nickname, which he uses in domain forums and other places. Having seen his “handle” before, I approved the comment after briefly reviewing it.
Shortly after posting the comment, virtually the same comment came in with the same handle, but it had an extra sentence at the bottom of it. Since I just woke up, I immediately approved the comment without much review, as I do for most people I know and trust. I received an email follow-up from the initial commenter who mentioned that he didn’t add the erronious sentence at the end.
I looked into it in my referrers/IP log, and sure enough, it wasn’t from the same IP. In fact, the second comment contained a back-link to a porn site – clearly unrelatated to the original commenter. Essentially, the spammer assumed (correctly in this case) that I would simply approve his comment.
Usually I check the back link (even though all back links are “no follow”) just to make sure I am not approving spam. You can tell what’s generally spammy when there are hyphens and other interesting URLs. Needless to say, I will now be more cautious when approving comments to make sure someone isn’t trying to get me to post their spam link.