Part of the lonely life of the long-distance blogger is the furious battle waged behind the scenes to stop idiotic spam overwhelming the website’s comment area.

In my case the website uses the Intense Debate comments facility. I receive an e-mail notification that a new comment has been posted, whereupon I go to my Intense Debate area and either approve or delete the comment.

So far almost no comments have been deleted, although I have noticed that some people appear to submit disobliging comments anonymously, eg by using a false e-mail address — how lame is that?

In any case, this website does not attract that many comments since its readers are subtle and discerning busy people who do not feel the need to burden the Internet with their wise observations.

Intense Debate is almost 100% accurate in filtering into a separate area plenty of spam messages. Now and again when I am bored I have a quick look in Spam to see if any sensible comment by some mischance has ended up there.

Doing this enables me to follow in a modest sort of way general spam trends. Latterly some spam comments are all in Chinese. More worryingly, some are starting to be pseudo-intelligent. They pick up points made in specific blog postings to try to trick the hapless blogger into approving them.

See for example this one which has just arrived, commenting on something I wrote earlier about speechwriting technique:

Without key messages, a speech is nothing.you must think carefully about it!
Also If you just like me ,just a crazy football fans,Intensely want to have the cheap authentic NFLJerseys you can come to this store XXX ,they will offer us a lot of sports jerseys!

Ha ha, spotted you. Into the Delete box you go.

But this blog always praises fine technique, wherever it may be found: nice try.

Update: If an earlier version of this posting reached anybody with utterly mangled format and making no sense whatsoever, apologies – I am experimenting with my brilliant Dragon speech recognition software and have yet to plumb all its mysteries safely…

Update 2:  A new Spam ruse emerges! Namely to add some terse but seemingly plausible comments to a number of posts in the hope that that commenter will then be approved, then to start slipping in rubbish about Air Jordan shoes or whatever. Blogoir to spammers: readers of this site probably already have as many Nike and/or Air Jordan shoes as they need! Go and pester someone else.