This blog has gone spamtacular
In August, the comment section of this blog was hit with 13,000 spam messages, which was at the low end of its normal 25k-35k range. At least this is what Akismet tells me. The number of actual comments is usually in 30-50/month range, I think.
In September, my comment sectionss got 186,998 spams. This has driven up my hosting costs rather spectacularly.
My host, MediaTemple.net — very reasonably priced, a little geeky to use, which is not a bad thing — pointed this out to me. I started checking my WordPress plugins and only then found out that my Akismet API key was no longer valid. I have no idea why it stopped being valid, or when that happened, but I’m hoping it was at the beginning of September. I have reenlisted in Akismet.
Being a dolt, I don’t know if using a comment spam filter like Akismet will reduce the hits on my site, or whether it will simply lower the number of bogus comments I have to manually wade through. I will check tomorrow.
I am also willing to accept ideas today.
(I have temporarily closed comments on posts older than 14 days. Sorry. But it’s not like I get a lot of those.)
UPDATE, that afternoon: The support person at MediaTemple suggested replacing Akismet with WP-Spamshield, and adding WordPress Spam Cleaner to get rid of existing spam. He also suggested this helpful article: Hardening WordPress. Thanks, Media Temple support person!
UPDATE, two days later: My comments traffic has dropped down to its usual trickle. Whew! I’m now going to turn back on the ability to comment on posts older than two weeks, and will see what happens.
