Here’s what happened when I shut down comments on posts older than a few days:
Apparently the spammers’ scripts can’t keep up with a short window and most comments happen in a few days, so this seems like a workable compromise. I know for a fact that spammers also employ humans to type comments, but that model doesn’t scale well at all.
Akismet disposes of most spam automatically, but presents me with a list of comments that it can’t classify. That list amounts to 10% of the daily catch, meaning I had to process that much junk every day just to keep up. I don’t know why Akismet can’t classify total gibberish as obvious spam and automatically delete it, but that’s how Akismet works.
As mentioned in the sidebar, send me a note to comment on an older post.
Now you know …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
4 responses to “Spam Volume”
This is why we can’t have nice things. Sigh.
The part that puzzles me: where does the money come from?
Much of the crap (which you don’t see) doesn’t even have valid URLs, let alone meaningful text; a full screen of Polish / Russian / Chinese gibberish certainly doesn’t count.
I can’t figure out who would pay for that or why.
Hmm, might be a “scouting mission”. If a spammer (or botnet) puts out gibberish and a site actually posts it, Professor Moriarty knows he then has an opportunity to get something more serious posted there. At least, that’s what I’d be worried about.
My dim awareness finally figured out that I’d painted a giant target on the blog with the Favorite Spam Comments page. Removing it didn’t produce an immediate change, of course, because their scripts already had my URL, but maybe a year from now things will be better.
I can hope, anyway…