Recently, we’ve been inundated with comment spam. Of course, none of this spam has ever made it as far as getting on the website, and only a very small fraction has made it into our comment moderation queue. At the time of writing this article, 2,599 spam comments have been prevented. Most of these have occured in the last month.

With no spam getting through, it almost resembles are poor attempt at a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. It is certainly more effective in this vain, than in attempting to create a Google Bomb to boost their internet search rankings. The spam queue is reviewed daily to check for false-positives ((Legitimate comments being marked as spam)), of which their have been none so far. Fortunately the spam is so easy to recognise that the likelihood of false-positives is insanely low.Thanks must go to the team at Akismet, for their excellent comment-spam filter.

What I don’t understand is why the spammers have not created more intelligent spam-bots, to maximise their impact. Surely it would not be hard to detect whether your spam attempt was successful, and if not, to move on to another site. Personally I’d rather Jack Bauer head up a team to “take out” the spammers, but at least intelligent spam-bots would know to leave this site alone.