On February 14, I noted that after 3 months, Akismet, which I use to filter spam from comments here, had blocked 100 comment spam. The rate was roughly 33 per month.

Today, 4 months later, that rate is over 100 per month. The ironic part about this is that the comment spam has increased even as my blogging output has decreased. I had assumed that they would key off changing content, as that would seem to indicate more of a userbase. While they do seem to key off of particular content (anecdotally, this is the page most commonly spammed), they don't seem to care about new content or rate of change at all.

I'd suggest that slower turnover is better, because it could potentially indicate a site administrator who's not overly in touch with the blog. However, states from Scoble and Arrington seem to suggest that their substantially more popular and changing blogs are spammed at a much greater frequency, not counted in hundreds per month, but in hundreds per hour or more.

Based on the content, I assume it is still largely out to game the search engines by linking all over creation. Right now, I just let Akismet delete it after 24 hours. Akismet has yet to turn up a false positive -- given my low rate of comments, this is not a huge endorsement, however -- and only misses the occasional spam. If my numbers were bigger, I'm sure I'd be much less thrilled.

Clearly, something needs to be done about this scourge of bots that allows spammers to operate so freely.