A month ago, I had serious spambot comment problems, which caused GBMINI (on WestHost) to basically die. I made a few changes, which included blocking some seriously aggressive IP addresses, but more significantly renaming the standard WordPress comment file (wp-comments-post.php); this file is arbitrarily searched for and accessed by spambot comment programs – the fact that I run the very effective WP-Gatekeeper keeps the spam out of my web pages, but the comments were hitting the site and the SQL database hard.
Of course, GBMINI WordPress also uses Akismet, which filters posted comments and detects spam (un-wanted words, too many links, that sort of thing). With WP-Gatekeeper running, Akismet basically never sees any spam comments – but a curious quirk is that it counts all the junked-by-Gatekeeper comments as blocked, as if it had done them itself.
This makes for a very interesting daily spam comment chart, showing the effect of the changes I made in mid March:
Basically my spam comment count dropped from 2,000-5,000 per day, down to just a few hundred per day – impressive 🙂
M&I / GBMINI 