In the 24 hours I have had WordPress running again I have had 1200 spam comments trapped by Akismet and Spam Karma.
With that sort of volume of spamming I have had to make the spam filters quite strict so there is a little more chance of getting false positives, and less chance of me spotting them – there is no way I am going through 1200 comments just in case! If anyone leaves a comment which doesn’t appear, let me know and I’ll look into it.
A lot of the spamming now seems to come from Japan-based sites running wiki-type software. The sites look genuine as far as I can tell, and I think they are mostly academic sites: there must be a fad in for academics to run wikis or pukiwikis. What is happening seems to be that these wikis allow anyone to upload content, in the original spirit of the Internet, and some less savoury types are abusing that by uploading scripts which generate all this spam.
I’m going to regret asking I know, but what the dickens is a pukiwiki? I asked the geek but he didn’t know either. I hope that makes you feel superior…
Didn’t you think to look it up on Wikipedia or Google it?
A pukiwiki is just a type of wiki, a php-based one. Its been written to cope with the Kanji character set so it is, as they say, big in Japan and hasn’t been translated to English.
The authors were made aware of all this last year and issued warnings, but there must be loads of users who have not done whatever is necessary to disable the dodgy uploads.