Popularity and Spam

Fellow bloggers-a question please!  Do you see an uptick in spam with the more hits you receive?

Obviously, I am.  Why else would I be asking?

The last month or so my daily readership has swelled by about 3-4 times!  Now I'm glad to see this (even though I have yet to earn a single penny from all these years of complaining), but along with this ballooning readership-I am seeing a huge amount of spam artists.

At first I would go into all the recent posts and delete them.  Then some of them would come back-several times over.  I then thought, "You fool, the more you delete them the more those spammers will come back."  

With that in mind, I stopped deleting all but the slightly, um, how do I say this in polite company?  Oh, the h-e-double sticks with it-I deleted the ones that were lewd.    Even with my ignoring them, they still visit and feel the need to leave their "mark" in my comment section.

Grrr.

I understand that they want people to go visit their sites.  One even said they "came back to see my site because I had visited them."

LIARS!  I have not ever visited any of the spam sites-and I will not do so anytime in the future.

Do you think this statement will discourage them?  I sure hope so.
Where do they come from and why?  Is it my subject matter?  My style of writing?  Could it be that they take turns irritating those of us who have blogs?

Maybe I should try an honest plea to cease and desist?  How's this for both a request and an ending to this week's post:

SPAMMERS:  PLEASE GO AWAY!  NONE OF US HERE WANT TO GAMBLE ON YOUR SITE OR BUY ANYTHING OFF OF YOUR LESS THAN WHOLESOME URL.  GO AWAY!  (I'm putting this in caps because I want you to know I really mean that I want to you listen to my published yelling)