I was puttering around looking at WordPress spam, so I wondered just how much I get. So I altered the WordPress Statistics for Emacs package to grab spam comments, too, so that I see what I have, and…
It’s about 160 spam comments per day across the blogs. These are all caught by Akismet Anti-Spam, so they don’t really bother me, but I was just curious.
(No, really!)
From what I can see, the spam seems to be coming in waves — a few dozen Russian-language spams, and then a few dozen from Hairstyles VIP, and then several dozens that seems to be crypto scammers, and so on.
People are presumably paying for these bot spam campaigns, but since they’re all caught by Akismet, it doesn’t look like they’re getting their money’s worth? Possibly?
Anyway, the moral here is: It’s impossible to run a WordPress site (with comments enabled) without using Akismet.