Clever Spam Comment

There have been over 22,000 spam comments which have been submitted to this blog since it was launched in November 2006. Most have been filtered automatically by the Akismet spam filter, but a small number do get through and require me to delete them manually. This is normally not a problem, as they can be spotted easily. However yesterday I noticed a comment which appeared to be legitimate - it mentioned Roddy MacLeod (a regular contributor to the blog) and appeared to give acknowledgements to some references which had been provided). However closer inspection revealed that the reference to Roddy was spurious and the submitter’s details included a link advertising Tokota cars.

I assume this is a clever form of automated spam ( taking the name details of someone who has commented previously and using this in a message containing some bland comments). Sadly it seems that even closer inspection of comments will be needed in future :-(