Off the Mark

Following Walt’s lead following Jessamyn’s (and others), I finally installed James McKay’s Comment Timeout for WordPress.

For the last couple months, and more so the last couple weeks, spam has really been ratcheting up. In the last 24 hours it has been completely over the top (for me)—more than 10-25 x average.

I am hoping this plugin may help reduce some of this. One reason is that I have generally always scanned through the list of Akismet captured spam as once in a great while a legitimate comment gets caught. In fact, if I comment on my own blog from my PC (logged in from my Mac usually) any comments I make get caught as spam about 50% of the time. But with this much spam I simply cannot look through it all and even if I did I might well miss the legitimate comment in all the noise.

If you have made a comment in the last few days and it did not show up, I sincerely apologize.

I really hope this helps!

I, too, have set the closing time at 180 days.

[Update]: Having lived with this for around 48 hours I can say that it is either a really odd coincidence (as Walt suggested as a possibility) or I can call this a resounding success.

I went from somewhere around 60 spam an hour to a total of perhaps 20 in the last 48. That is 20 total.