What good does spam serve to spammers?

[folgerj]

If I was to assume that spammers read these forums and know that we are using captcha, askimet and defensio and all their hard work is going automatically into the trash bn and never gets in front of an audience???

Is there something that I'm missing here? or are they hoping we as bloggers are unprotected and all these posts are getting out there...

I would think they would check to see their work and if they got nothing out of it they would move on...

Are they idiots or is there something I'm missing?

Are they able to benefit virtually by having the links active while they are in our que waiting to be deleted? I don't think this is possible but every step I take forward feels like three steps backward in this technologically advancing world...

thoughts?

[jaywilliams]

First off, 98%* of all spam is simply computer submitted. There normally isn't a person manually typing in those spam comments on your site. There are "spam bots" that submit comments, send spam e-mails, etc, 24/7. And it only takes a split second for them to send a spam comment, and even if only 1% of those comments actually get published on a blog, that 1% is still a large number of posts. And in return could drive more traffic to the site in which they are trying to promote.

Either way, spam is annoying, and it won't stop until it becomes financially unprofitable. But thanks to improved Spam filters, more and more spam is stopped every year! And for that, I'm extremely grateful.

* I made this number up based off of my experience with spam, that is not sound, scientific number.

[folgerj]

I guess the recommended referrer list is working. I slapped that into my htacess and I just checked my server and not one spam on the server... whewww! I hope that takes care of them for a while. I appreciate all the love the spammers were showing me lately but I'm glad this shut them down for a while... I know it won't last but we'll see if I can concentrate on other problems like world hunger...

Thanks..