The comment spammers are back.
I’ve probably deleted something in the area of 1500 spam comments by now. They trickle in steadily, and the spammers are getting more and more resourceful–tricking the filter by using HTML entities, for example. They usually don’t show up because WordPress (correctly) flags most of them for moderation, but it’s still annoying to have to manually delete all of them. (And rather discouraging to find that by the time you’ve done away with the first batch, a couple more have popped up.) This is only compounded by the fact that WordPress doesn’t catch all of the spam–and the longer spam sits on your site, the more likely Google is to cache it, and let the spammers know that you’re an easy target.
So I’ve installed two plugins, one which will glean “spam words” and add them to a blacklist from comments I mark as spam, and another which will … actually, I’m not exactly sure what it does, but hopefully when I check my inbox tomorrow, I won’t have any emails with the subject line “[Refraction] Please approve: …”