New variety of comment spam

“thanks for the review of liferea, very interesting” from fanof don lapre arrived in my moderation queue today. I approved it. I think automated services (Akismet) probably would have, too. Fanof looked like a possible first name at a glance (obviously, it’s not — it means “Fan of” and Don Lapre is a name) but the commenter URL linked to an innocuous website with pay-for-copy content and occasional spam links.

So where’d the authentic-looking comment come from? (It was on my Liferea review post.) I’m pretty sure someone must link here using that text. For example, I might say “check out this (link start) review of Liferea (link end)” in an article, and spam robots would see that pointed to a blog (perhaps using Technorati or similar) and pursue the link to leave a comment. Using human text. I don’t know what the linguistic success rate of this would be — though I would hazard with the amount of blog content out there, one could have fairly stringent filters to improve success — but it worked well in this instance.