Boots! Not shoes!

I rarely use the word, but I HATE spammers. They are the true 21st century pest.
Whoever praises 21st century social networks, the Web 2.0, or whatever you call it, they totally mask out those who abuse all the interesting things.
Indeed it is an interesting opportunity when readers can comment articles or add useful information thereto. This weblog was my testbed for an interactive webpage, a place where you could add opinions to what I write.
However I had to learn what does not work:

• Trackbacks
  Trackbacks are an automated way to link related information over many weblogs. So if I link to some text on a different blog such as Tulane's, the other blog will receive an automatic notification and can then link back to my page. Vice versa if someone links to a blog entry here, you should see a trackback URL next to the article. Useful, but abused. I had to shut down this feature within the very first weeks as all trackbacks I received were from spammers pointing to totally unrelated sites.
• Unrestricted comments
  You are free to comment on the articles here and I welcome you to do so. But the very first comments placed here had nothing to do with the topics but were instead automated spam messages. So I added a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This is the image you have to read before placing your comment. Only humans can read the characters in the image, so spam bots are locked out.
• Unmoderated comments
  OK, I never allowed unmoderated comments because I know that readers tend to put unrelated questions into comments, rude language or private data. So every comment you post is read by me first then then published here.

So you think this should be sufficient to exclude all the spammers? Wrong. Here's an excerpt from a comment just posted to the article "Rare 1970's Vinyl Boots on ebay":

You might think for a pair of practical and fashion boots to pass this winter. Now I will introduce this brand to you.

Get it? Someone wrote a comment on boots = shoes to my article on bootlegs! And the comment of course included lots of links to the super cheap boot store.
How can this happen? Someone broke the captcha system and had a computer post the comment? No, worse:
To post such kind of spam into weblogs and other kinds of social networks, spammers employ poor people in Africa or China who spend the whole day reading the Internet locating keywords. And when they find an article about "boots" they manually post the spam message. Isn't that horrible? you see why I hate spammers?