While no system is impenetrable, our registration system makes it difficult for comment spammers to post to our site in any kind of automated fashion. We've always had relatively little comment spam because it's generally not worth the time to register, respond to an email and fill out a profile before spamming.

But we've seen an uptick lately. It's not onerous yet, but I've deleted more comment spam in the past two months than in the past two years.

And they're getting more sophisticated. Today we saw someone post two fairly legit comments before a third one that was clearly spam.

So what does this mean?

• Has our search ranking gotten so good that it's worth the labor? It doesn't appear so to me.



• Has the economy gotten so bad that there are enough out of work people spamming for pennies?



• Tangential to that, have innovations like Amazon's Mechanical Turk made human-posted spam scalable?

Other theories I'm missing? At any rate, rest assured that we'll continue to be quick on the deletion of spam.