I hope you guys have a great last leg of your trip… time went by fast these past few weeks/months, huh?

About the guy who posts advertisments and other BS to your blog: his main reason for doing so might very well be to get a higher ranking on Google (and perhaps other search engines, depending on how they work). The more links he can get to his site, the higher up on Google’s search result list he will come. Blog-spamming has become a big thing, from what I’ve heard.

Actually, if the guy is smart, he’s not posting anything manually to blogs… - he might very well have a “robot” do it for him. That is, a piece of software that searches the net (like a search engine’s robot), and when it finds a form (like the one I’m writing in right now), it automatically fills in the fields and posts the form.

You might be able to make it more difficult for such an automated process if you made some changes to the form layout. The robot might get confused if it doesn’t quite recognize the form… for example if you change the name of the fields or their order.
*but, then again, if the script is smart, it might not be fooled…*

A sure way of stopping automated spam is to add a test for the user, to prove that it’s a human user entering the text. You’ve probably seen these tests on some places… They usually have an obscure image with some characters on it, and then the user has to enter those exact characters into a field in the form for the form to work.

A’ight, gotta go. Take care! Have a great wrap-up to your travels!