I didn’t pop that Jan 15 post (see below)back up to the top of the stack. Some spammer or outside poster responded to it with a comment that had something to do with van Cleef and Arpels jewelry–I only briefly glanced at it. The thread then bumped to the head of the line.

I suppose one of our moderators spotted the activity and trashed the spam, because it is now gone. But I’m curious as to how it found our site in the first place, and then how it picked on my particular old post to respond to. It appears to be some kind of random, shot-in-the-dark process. I didn’t read the spam very carefully, but it didn’t seem to be normal commercial advertising; it was more like a letter to a complaint department, as I recall. Now that I think about it, it might have been a legit business communication that somehow wound up here by accident.

How does this sort of thing work? What’s the mechanism? Was it deliberate, malicious, or some kind of random malfunction? Or is it evidence of some deep and mysterious fundamental flaw in the architecture of the web?