Gah. Dr. Jerz, I'm having the same problem with this URL, too. I've never had trouble like this before, I'm not sure why my comments are being denied.

Sorry about that. In an effort to keep spammers out I accidentally blocked all URLs from appearing on the site.

In the few hours that was in place, the system blocked 590 spam attempts.

That should give you an idea how aggressive the blog spammers are. Sometimes the comments from legitimate users are like needles in a spamstack.

As for the spammers who are trying to sell something, what do they think they're accomplishing? I guess they must make SOME money off it because otherwise they wouldn't do it. But have you ever known anyone who would make a purchase from a spammer?

You're right, Megan, it costs them so little money that it only takes a tiny benefit for them to think it's worthwhile. One reason they do it is because they want to make it look like a real human being posted a blog entry with a link to their home page. Google ranks websites acording to the number and quality of inbound links. Google has noticed that our site is updated regularly, and we're not linking to commercial websites that exist only to sell stuff. So when Google notices a link from this collection of pages, it's worth a bit to the PageRank of that site.