I had a blog site that was forced offline from the sheer volume of trackback and referrer spam that was hitting it - even though I didn't display a list of referrers, the spammers must have bots to detect certain blog software and hit it automatically.

I wrote a custom system for adding comments to some technical pages, and I get five or six comments trying to hawk viagra every day.  The comments have to get approved before they appear on the web, and of course these get filtered out by me, but the spammers keep trying.  Is this a bot or is this some guy in the third world being paid peanuts to surf the web and find places to spam for viagra?

I have to admit, and it's a painful thing to do having being involved in spam-fighting in earlier years, Ed is right and the spammers are winning.  Or maybe they've won.