Spammer Rant

OK....so this is going to be a bit of a rant.  Why, oh why, are these people so intent on spamming?  In the last several weeks this blog has been overrun by spammers.  Well, not exactly overrun, but that is only because I have been weeding them out.  I had been getting tens of spam comments a day....probably fifty.  All filled with nonsense, but with web addresses that all seek to sell something ridiculous.  They got through to me despite my 'arithmetic' problem that had to be solved in order to submit a comment.  Then I switched to another type of spam blocker and, while that was much more effective at blocking spam comments, now I get fifty trackbacks sent in for approval a day, all from websites I do not want my blog associated with. The problem is that it takes time to sort through all these and ensure they are spam.  When rushing through them, it is also possible to accidentally mark a real comment that is amongst fifty spam ones as spam by accident.  If that has happened to anyone, I apologize.  I even entertained closing the blog to comments for a period of time to see if that might stop these idiots.  However, I have decided against that for the moment.

What do these people hope to gain, when I have not published a single bit of their nonsense on the blog?  I suspect the whole process is automated and is really no effort on their part. Anyone else out there have any experience with dealing with this nonsense easily and effectively?