Talk to a blogger about, say, the mainstream media, and you’ll get a lot of rolling eyeballs and maybe the odd expletive. Just mention comment spam, and you’ll hear a stream of foul-mouthed invective that would peel armoured plating off a tank.

I’m currently unduring a flood of the stuff (comment spam, that is), which probably means a lot of other folks are as well. WordPress 2.0’s Akismet anti-spam plugin is catching most of it, but by no means all. These things seem to come in waves, so say a silent prayer for all those bloggers who are wading through the crap in their backends.

(Er, that could have come out better. Er, could have been phrased better. Moving along.)

Comment spam is one of those things that make me see red. Partly it’s the fact that it comes from people who are happy to waste my time. But it’s also the way that they’re poisoning the well: depleting the value of a common resource for their personal gain, while they contribute exactly nothing of value.

And actually, the value is less than zero, because what they’re aiming to do is fundamentally dishonest. Blogs are just collateral damage in the comment spammer’s bigger campaign, which is to game the search engines so that you, Ms. or Mr. Average Internet User, get routed to their clients instead of the information you’re actually looking for.

What kind of punishment fits that crime?

Some would start reaching for a length of rope, but I believe the answer is less violent. With their wanton disregard for both common property and private resources, comment spammers may not have proven themselves unfit to live – but they have proven themselves unfit to live in civil society.

It’s been a long time since our civilization used exile as a formal punishment. But maybe we ought to be scouting out some remote island territory.

Particularly if that island doesn’t have a net connection.