The spam attacks in my comments have decreased since enabling the comment approval, especially from attacks that previously resulted in 4 or 5 posts all at once. Even still, I was getting 3 to 6 spam comments per day and it was getting old deleting these viagra-endorsing comments. I began to notice that all of the spam attacks were taking place in older posts, sometimes going back months. Using this information, the spam problem has been "solved," at least for now.
How is it solved? Since no one posts comments on anything but the most recent blog entries, I will be disabling comments on posts more than a few weeks old. This means that the spammer's comments will be denied at the time of posting, and I do not have to waste time deleting them. Since no one comments on posts that old anyway, I won't be losing any reader contributions.
I'll have more to say about spam, spim and spit (yes, spit) in my next entry. Stay tuned.
Sometimes people post useful comments in old posts; this has happened to me a few times. For the most part, though, closing comments on old posts is a good idea.
yey..so it was a bot doing it? what if a topic is really hot? like the firefox topic...how many "weeks" does it take for the spam to hit it? is this long enough for everyone to be able to say what they want? (i assume it is, since you say so :P)
I don't think since June that there's been a comment on a post more than about 4 down on the list. I wouldn't do it if I thought it would mean losing interesting comments.
I don't know if it was a bot or not. My point about the successive posts is that a bot probably wouldn't pay attention to success or error codes, whereas a person would, but maybe bots are way more advanced than I give credit for. :-/
Not a single blog comment spam post since I did this. :)