the corner office

I got my first dose of comment spam today. I'd hoped that my home-rolled blog with its non-standard form fields would make me less of a target, but it only delayed the inevitable, I guess. Given that nearly 30 comments were posted within seconds, it must be automated, but I wonder how these people operate. Did some poor geezer in a cyber-sweatshop inspect my HTML source and manually map the fields, or do they use bots which apply a few heuristics to guess which fields are which? They must've done a GET to load the page, before POSTing the comments, because even a few hidden fields which I set for each page were faithfully sent back.

Some anti-spam measures quickly added to my blog template - lessee how that works out.