Wow. While I was on vacation, Spam Karma kind of freaked out in some way and was no longer functioning. As a result, I was left with the default WordPress comment moderation facilities.

Thank goodness for the default WordPress spam blocking functionality! Even though it left over 400 spam comments to moderate for Nazin and over 200 to moderate for my personal site (over the course of a week), at least it caught them and prevented them from appearing on the site itself!

My email client checks my accounts every 5 minutes, and on every refresh, it would pull down about 5 new comment moderation messages. That means that by yesterday, my site was getting comment spam or trackback spam once every minute during parts of the day. That is incredible.

You know, comment spam seems like a logical step for spammers, but you have to admit that the Trackback Spam, or Sping, is absolutely vile in an irritatingly clever way.

When you reach this level of blog spam, you realize how helpful services like Spam Karma are, and how incomplete CAPTCHA is as a solution to spam. It was never meant to be a total blog spam solution, but some people flog it as such. I used to be one of them. And now I’m glad I have Spam Karma. Except for its glitch (which I think was database related, not actually a fault of Spam Karma), it has had a 100% success rate for positive and negative spam identification.