Spam artists–and I use that term in a pejorative way–frequently begin their comments with, “this is off topic, but have you ever considered. . . ?”
These comments do little to renew my faith in SPAM artists. I post about magical realism, and the comment is, “Great post. I’ll be checking your blog often. I know this is off topic, but I’ve discovered this great hemorrhoid medication that’s the best invention since white bread?”
Well, I’m not a fan of white bread, but I doubt that the readers of this blog care much about white bread or hemorrhoid medication. Fortunately, the WordPress spamcatcher tosses comments like this into limbo where nobody sees them.
I suspect badly programmed bots account for such inane comments and I wonder how the spammers ever get any income off such work.
Those bots don’t realize that most of us pretend hemorrhoids and other nasty diseases don’t exist and really think it’s TMI for a spammer to mention them. I guess some bloggers must be desperate for comments, so they approve SPAM in the belief it’s better than silence.
When I read through the prospective SPAM comments, I think–to put it bluntly–that 99.99% of them are crap and couldn’t possibly influence anyone to do anything. I really don’t want to know what kinds of low-life people are susceptible to it.
I guess you can tell I cleaned out the SPAM queue today and didn’t come away with a positive view of humanity.
–Malcolm
Malcolm's Round Table 
I’ve seen spam for over a decade now and I still fail to understand why they do it. The odds of it working must be minuscule, but Akismet (the spam blocker used by WordPess tells me that it has blocked 470,844 spam comments for my blog. Fortunately this isn’t a paper medium that we use, or the forests would all be gone by now.
Yes, Akismet catches just about all if it. I never read any of it, but am aware of the subject matter.