You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
For reasons beyond knowing, the vast single neuron intelligence behind blog spam has been upping its game recently. I noticed the uptick in December and it seems to be confirmed by the folks making Akismet [1]. There are no signs in January so far that the deluge is slowing. Someone has powered on their spamminators, and pointed them directly at WordPress blogs everywhere.
What is it that they expect to gain? I have three layers of comment spam filtering here: Bad Behavior [2], Akismet [3], and finally all comments that make it through the first two layers are moderated. Thousands and thousands of comments get trashed here every month. Nothing gets through: zero. If there was any intelligence in the process whatsoever, the spammers would have removed my site from the list long ago. And I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of blog owners are doing the same.
It’s another instance where, when the measurable cost approaches zero, any stupidity is economical. I really wish there was some way I could charge something for each wasted comment my filters catch. I’d be rich!