Anyone seeing a noticable upturn at the moment?

I'm getting pretty high levels (1/minute) from several unrelated blogs this morning.  Pretty brainless stuff - none of it is actually getting published, but wondered whether it was just me.

Sounds like your url(s) were entered into someone's mass spam stream, which has happened from time to time for me.

Not here. I recently started getting a lot of spam on one site, but it's not a WP site and other sites running the same stuff (Drupal), same versions aren't being hit.

but note that WP 3.0.5 was just released to fix some XSS exploits, so you're perhaps getting hit with those
http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0.5


I find that Wordpress Hashcash reduces spam pretty well without annoying users with inscrutable CAPTCHA or without long delays waiting for RECAPTCHA to respond.

http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/

Checked round some of my WP installations and nothing really there.

On some older sites I use the now unsupported Spam Karma and all the others I use Akismet.  Not seeing any huge upswing in spam.

Sites hosted either in the UK or US.

Yeah, it's me.  It's one bloke with some crap software bouncing off various chinese proxies.  Added a filter on his sitenames, so now he's spamming for his satellite sites instead. 

I think he decided to target one of our blogs, found a related one from there - then looked to see whether we had any others suited to other crap he is peddling. 

I have a few blogs that have been hit by a competitors SEO amongst others recently.


This competitor is also a supplier, so I was a bit miffed. This is a mult million pound business, employing an SEO who uses comment spam.

Stuns me.

I should rephrase that. 

The bit that stuns me is they do it straight to their main URL, never thinking to clean it on the way.

I have noticed that there is an upturn in contact form spam, but adding a CAPTCHA on the form sorts that side out.  Akismet is still great for cleaning the comment spam.

I am using ZBBlock on one site that was prone to spam and it has mostly stopped. I have other sites that get no spam, but now I have begun to block pingbacks.