return of the comment spammers

It's been odd - in the last 2 weeks there's been an exponential increase in the number of comment spam attempts on this blog. It's all been unsuccessful because of the comment moderation, but it's still inconvenient if only because I get the email notification of each attempt. Some of these are quite vile. Are any other bloggers experiencing the same thing right now? Legitimate comments are welcome :)

Comments

[morgan]

27 attempts in the 20 mins since I wrote this post

[Walt Crawford]

Not here. With SpamKarma2 and LISHost hosting (and server-level blocks), I'm still encountering fewer spam attempts than legitimate comments--and I *don't* get email unless the spam's good enough for moderating (which almost never happens). I'm down to around 10/day, at a blog that gets around 2,000 visits a day. (I turned off trackbacks a long time ago. That helps a LOT.)

[snail]

The advantage of a hand coded blog is that I don't have comment spam. The disadvantage of a hand coded blog is that I don't have a comments module.

[K.G. Schneider]

Most of my comment spam vanishes into the Askimet spam queue, but yesterday about 100 posts suddenly arrived in my moderation queue in two waves.

That said, Askimet catches so much spam I'm not sure that was even worth mentioning... it was one of those rare moments when Askimet was behind the curve.

I have trackbacks enabled, without any appreciable impact. Most spam still comes through the comment queue.

[morgan]

Fortunately the volume of spam attempts has died down from that peak on Friday.

Walt: I can see that there are much better ways of dealing with this than just moderation which makes the blogger do all the filtering. If the problem persists and there's no good solution for me, I'll looking into switching from TypePad.

Snail: Spam isn't the only problem with comments. There are the legal issues too - particularly bloggers being liable for defamatory comments. Still, at this moment for me, the benefits from the interactivity outweigh the worries.

K.G. Schneider: Thanks, I'll keep Askimet in mind if this still is a major problem for me. In the past, before I started moderation, track back spam was a nightmare for me. What I don't get is why they bother spamming a moderated blog. Do they think if they do it enough we'll just let them all through? Unless they're dealing with such large volumes they don't care and don't find that information.

[snail]

I see what you mean with regard to legal issues, there was a report on the weekend with regard to the settlement of a legal action. Blogger comments on a newspaper site were claimed to be central to the case.

[morgan]

Snail: That's what I was thinking of when I wrote the above. I'm undecided whether I like the idea of bloggers being liable for defamatory comments as a general principle, but in this case, I think it was a fair outcome. The Tele had been working its readers into a frenzy on this issue and even if it didn't say some of these things, it encouraged its readers to do so and provided the platform. Even if it wasn't illegal, it's bad form to allow nasty/defamatory comments through.