Comment Spam Hell

[bj]

A few days ago I went through a bizarre attack of comment spam. I blogged about it here.

Attack of the Spambots

And here:

I am just NOT having a good day

And here:

Back to Normal

According to Michael Hampton, author of the incredible Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress, "Yep, there's a significant increase in spam lately. It's worse than anything I've ever seen. I think the spammers have gone absolutely insane." I use Bad Behavior, and most times it does a stellar job, but this time they were coming in faster than I could delete them, and Bad Behavior wasn't blocking all of them.

It didn't just affect comments, but also my contact form. I ended up using a plugin called the Comment Timeout Plugin (shuts off comment form on older posts) and updating my Contact Form plugin to get things under control. There are some other suggestions that some of my legit commenters made on my posts that I may try if things get bad again, but what I did worked for me.

Have you all noticed any increase lately? What do you do to deal with it?

[texxs]

no increase on my or my clients blogs lately.

I'll keep an eye on it though, thanks for the warning.

[bugnbelle]

OMG I've been inudated. I finally shut my comments off because I don't get many and the SPAM was driving me absolutely nuts. I made a list of words that were not going to effect me if nuked like *****, balding, etc. But you can only nuke so many words before you might nuke something relevant.

I'll have to go look into those add ons.