It’s been a while since I posted on comment spam, and since it used to be a regular topic, I figured it might deserve an update.
It seems like it’s been on the rise lately; I’m averaging about 300 spam comment attempts per day on here. Obviously most of them get caught, but due to the increased volume a couple have slipped through in the last month or so.
I’m currently using a combination of Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 to filter most of them out, and that seems to work pretty well. I disabled the Akismet plugin a long while ago because of false positives, and for a while after that I was using a Spam Karma 2 plugin that used Akismet as just one source for karma, but I eventually ended up disabling that as well. I may go back and use that again once I get a chance to modify it slightly. I want to make it still give negative karma points for comments it identifies as spam, but I don’t want it to give positive points for comments it says are not spam, because (in my experience) too many slip through the cracks that way.