Laura and I have been attempting to fight an onslaught of comment spm. Our good friend Julia was even called in to help. The site was receiving so much spm that we were kicked off of Askiment’s Pro Plan and told they would only support us at the Enterprise level to the tune of $249/mo. This would literally bankrupt us.
As a result of this issue, we had to turn commenting off at the beginning of July just to stop the flow of garbage coming in. One day we received upwards of 50k sp*m attempts. We spent hours deleting all the messages as there was no other way to clear them out.
We are attempting to turn comments back on with some new filtering software in place. If the current filtering system does not work, we may have to turn commenting off again while we attempt to patch in a new system.
If you are tech savvy and have any advice, please let me know. If you are a sp*mmer, I hope you find someone else to bother.
Hi! I’ve been a longtime follower (awesome site! Love me my FPs and stationery!), but I also work at Automattic, the parent company of (among other software products like WordPress.com and Tumblr) Akismet. I just emailed you with a couple of suggestions, so hopefully those will help!
Thanks so much! Much appreciated!