I've been noticing those weird comments, too. No links to pr0n or pill pushers, just odd little comments. After hesitating a while, I decided to do what you do--I delete them. I've also begun turning off comments on the old entries that seem to be drawing comment spam.

Hm. My first reaction to this post was, "Did I post a strange, incomprehensible comment here recently?". I don't think I did, but even so, it brings to mind a question:

Would blog spam be a problem if the contents of the URL field weren't put into a link tag, but instead displayed in text on the page?

Banned? My comments are always random sounding. One site banned the comment "interesting". Sometimes that all I can think of to say. As a courtesy I was just letting them know I had read it and was still thinking.

It's not easy to recognize "spam" is it? I also thought that six Persian blogs that started coming in suddenly were spammers. I couldn't read their site and they all came in so suddenly. I removed them from the referrer list.

Then I was ashamed when another came in and I saw this glowing dotted box code with Arabic writing inside. The other sites had little html and css tricks we had demonstrated. Now I realize they were simply telling their friends about us and using some copy-and-paste code. I learned a lesson. Yours may be more obvious, this was just my experience and my mistake.

Nice place you have here.

This morning I got one from jesusisreligion dot com. It did relate in a superficial way to the post but still felt like a veiled attempt to get their site linked to. The target wasn't a commercial site, but ideological. Is that still spam?

I deleted it on the basis that it was still an attempt to game the system.