Is it a really bad day for spam generally, or is it just me? Has anyone else had a deluge today? I have had 5,000 (!) spam comments for moderation today. That is 5,000 comments on top of the ones picked up by Akismet. I am wondering if this is just a one-off, or if spam levels are really increasing. I would not be able to cope with this volume every day and if it carries on I’ll just have to consider making it necessary to log in to post comments – which is a real pain for everyone.
Obviously it takes a bit of time to mark and delete 5,000 comments so I was skimming the list and there is a chance I may have accidentally deleted a real comment by mistake.
5000! Poor you. I think spam levels are rising in general. I think it’s about trying to game the Google page rank with links in the comments. So much so that Google seem to have noticed. Google blog says they are testing a new tag so that the spammers dont get credit for their spam links. Hopefully that means they give up and go away and leave all of us in peace.
5000 was a peak. It is still bloody awful though.
Mostly it is all from the same IP address in Russia and is some clever automated thingy which adds exactly the same poxy message as a comment on every single post. All with the same name, address, etc. And then its another comment on every single post.
As soon as I see a different comment from that IP I know there is going to be another thousand during the next 24 hours.
I tried putting the IP into the .htaccess file as a “deny” but it still comes.
Seriously, if I knew I was going to be away for a few days or unable to clear up regularly I would have to disable comments completely because the backlog would stuff everything up.