Well it looks as though the storms of Trackback and Comment spam that I mentioned last week have just about tailed off now. About 6200-6300 posts were reported as junk by akismet and the “other” spam killing plugin probably got another couple hundred, so it’s been pretty deep. Anyway, the first few days, I was seeing spikes of about 200 or so junk comments/trackbacks happen for about an hour every 2-3 hours and today there’s just been a “spike” of a bit under 100 for an hour once in the day. I think there may have been one yesterday. Just not much to “write home about”.
Anyway, I’ve mostly found out by checking the akismet plugin to see how much it’s “caught” and checking to see if there’s anything to moderate. So far, since using both akismet and trackback validator there have been NO junk trackbacks/comments get through. The ONLY issue is that I had to switch off notification of comments by email because the trackback validator works AFTER the comment is left (and it gets past akismet…)
Well – just thought I’d toss out an update on that…
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[…] I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?) […]