Major Spamming

Are you using Akismet? That’s one of the better ones out there.

I had loads on one of my installations once. Really horrible stuff as well. Akismet sorted it out in the end. That’s what I would use if you haven’t already tried it. It can be a major problem though, once you have been identified as a target. Also turning comments off globally for a while can help, just remember that your old posts that have comments turned in will override this so you’ll need to go through them.

This is done in the settings>discussion section:

1. Don’t leave comments on forever (the shorter the better): close comments on articles older than [X] days 14 is good.
2. Don’t allow links in comments. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains [X] or more links (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.) – set to 1 (the goal of spammers is to place links to their (likely malicious) websites.
3. And at: When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”

add to this list:

http
ftp
url
.com
swears
etc.

This can and will help.

Thank you very much everyone. I installed it last night. I had 2 comments waiting in the akismet queue and not in my inbox!