I recently stumbled across an archived mailing list post of mine from the days before spammers started targeting WordPress. Someone had remarked that their spam problem had disappeared when they switched from Movable Type to WordPress, and I responded:

Oh, they hit us WordPress users too, just not as often as MT. Having it automatically moderate comments with certain keywords or more than X number of links helps cut it down, and the ability to (a) see all the latest comments and (b) mass-delete comments reduces the pain of cleanup. But they do target WP blogs from time to time.

I tend to get a pair of comments sent to the moderation queue every few weeks (presumably they figure if the first two didn’t show up, they won’t waste their time with more), but just this morning I had to delete a spam comment that came in last night and didn’t trip the moderation rules. (One of those with the generic “I like your site” messages and the author’s URL being the spamvertized site.)

That was September 2004. How things have changed! All WordPress blogs come with Akismet as an anti-spam measure, but I still prefer to use Bad Behavior, which has blocked ~2900 hits to this site in the past week alone, and Spam Karma, which has collected over 17,000 comment spams.

And with all those counter-measures in place, I get a couple of comments landing in the moderation queue each week. And just this morning I had to delete a spam comment that came in last night and didn’t trip either layer of defense (it was a generic piece targeting keywords found in a post). The filters are just barely keeping pace with the increased volume.