State of the Spamosphere « planetOzh

For the last 5 days or so, I've been experiencing the biggest spam flood I've ever had, going at the steady rate of about one spam comment every 15 seconds, which ends up making quite big numbers by the end of the day.

I almost could not care, having here on this blog 3 lines of defense against the evil spammers :

• a simple yet very efficient referrer spam check (yes, I know, I said I would release it months ago, it's still on my todo list, I swear :)
• Bad Behavior, which is blocking known robots from even accessing the site
• Akismet, a comment analysis whose job is to determine if a submitted comment is legit or crap

I almost could not care, but the thing is, the moderation queue gets hammered with spam comments, and the spam queue gets filled quicker than I can clean it. By the time I wrote these few lines, 30 new spams got caught by Akismet. And if Akismet ever goes down for a second, 10 comments make it through.

So, here enters a fourth line of defense against spam : Spamquiz, a simple plugin Marco made a few months ago and that I preciously kept here till the day I would feel I need it. Didn't work with WP 2.x it seems. However, I found a little plugin which looks really really neat : Did you pass maths ?. Hope it has some benefits. At least it'll make real commenters use their brain a bit before they can post :)