Pretty much all of us have to deal with spam at some level. No matter how annoying the spammers are at any one level they get worse the more things you have to deal with. For example, just dealing with spam in E-mail can be a real pain if you don’t have good filtering and you have the misfortune of having a common username (even worse if your username is a common English word). If you’re a blogger you have to deal with comment and trackback spam as well. It doesn’t matter how popular your blog is or how much you post, as long as there’s a single post that the spambots can comment/trackback to they’ll eventually find you and start spamming your blog.
Spammers, and their spambots, view every single script they can find online as a target. Those of you who’ve had tagboards or shoutboxes will know exactly what I mean, spammers will try to see if the tagboard/shoutbox script can be abused to send their spam E-mails. You’ll end up with mail headers from their test attempts posted as comments. As annoying as they are though, there are some very smart people out there writing the bots that they use to attack us. In dealing with spam on the site, I’ve noticed that the patterns of attack are very different depending on the attacked service.