Well, apparently some comment spammers found my site at some point and had started the process of automating comment spam into my articles. I have disabled comments, deleted all comments from the database directly and removed the user accounts that were created by the comment spammers (most were using email addresses in China) and generally cleaned up some of the areas of the site that enticed them to visit it.
I guess I should have been more active in checking but I have not gotten any requests to moderate comments and so assumed that there were none. Unfortunately, it appears as if the comment moderation piece of the CMS is borked. The comments are supposed to be moderated by an administrator but it displays the comments even if they have not been approved yet. This, coupled with the fact that comment spammers were mostly hitting the articles that had already scrolled off the main page, led them to believe that this site was a ripe target for their work.

I guess I have to take the blame for that, I really should have been more aware but my long absence must have lulled me into a false sense of security. This does, however, explain the increased traffic that I have been seeing to the site and especially the large amounts of bandwidth being sent out to very specific IP addresses that seemed to be basically indexing my site repeatedly for no reason that I could see. Apparently, there is an ISP in Poland, part of the ThePlanet that hosts one very insistent of these fellows. These others appear to be operating from ISP's in China, so I can only assume that it might be some of the usual suspects that were using my site to try to manipulate Google pagerank.

I guess I should also note that Italian appears to be a very large language of choice for these SEO spammers since a lot of the comments were aimed at specific Italian language sites. I don't know what the big attraction is for comment spammers using Italian spam words but I guess that must be a very specific piece of their business. At any rate, if any of you SEO types actually read the articles before pushing your spam into the comments section, a big FU from me to you. Find somewhere else since the comments section will NOT be coming back online as I have no interest in aiding your slimy business.