I was getting slammed with comment spam tonight, all for prescription drugs. But Wordpress, being wonderful, stopped 99% of it and dropped the spams into my moderation queue, where I just gave a quick look to confirm they were all spams, and then deleted them all in one fell swoop. The ones it missed were for one particular drug, which I’ve now added to my moderation list, and best of all, the spammer was dumb enough to post all the comments from the same IP, so now I’ve blacklisted his IP. Hooray for Wordpress!
Followup: The spam just kept coming, although WP was good enough to put 95% of it in the moderation queue, for me to delete by hand. Strong measures were needed, however, so I installed the wp-hashcash plugin, which adds a hidden form field to the comments form. It doesn’t affect human users at all, but it stops bots from being able to do anything, and since turning it on 24 hours ago, I haven’t had a single spam, so it seems to be working well.
Followup 7/27/2005: Hashcash has done the trick! My spam problems are effectively over. I still get one or two a month thrown in the moderation queue, but not a single spam has slipped through, and not a single person (to my knowledge) has been prevented from commenting. Victoly!
I'm a 30-year-old 
Lucky. Drupal has a spam module I can install which would take care of my recent comment spam issue, but I don’t have an SSH client with which to get into my account at nfs.net and install it. Grr, I say.
May 26th, 2005 at 5:15 pm
Grab putty - it doesn’t need to be installed, it’s just a free-running .exe file.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
I haven’t been anywhere where I’ve felt I had the leisure to run through the install (of the module), but I might try it this weekend. Just requiring preview before posting has cut it down to almost nothing, so I think the bots are rather stupid. It’s annoying that these sites are filling up my referrer logs, though.
May 27th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
Installed the spam module yesterday, since I have nothing but time this weekend. So far it’s caught everything. Not sure I can do much for the referrer logs, though. I’m going to check into the new version of the software 4.6 (I’m running 4.5 still) and see whether it has any way to filter the results of the referrer logs. I’ve oft thought it would be nice not to see my own browsing reflected in the logs; I know I am all over the damned site, I don’t need the logs to tell me that. =)
May 29th, 2005 at 10:08 am
Just testing. 1234
June 5th, 2005 at 1:01 am