Opposing spam

My friend and fellow blogger Stephanie recently wrote about the rise and purpose of spam comments on Blogger and Wordpress. In recent weeks, her blog has been hit with tens of thousands of such comments; most were caught by her filters but enough made it onto World Turn'd Upside Down to justify her turning on the word verification system.

While I appreciate how frustrating the situation was to Stephanie, I was relieved to see her post! My own blog has received well over a hundred spam comments in the past three months; that number is a far cry from the thousands that Stephanie has received, but before her post I wondered what I had done to attract all the spam. Fortunately, with comment moderation activated on Air Nice-to-Livelands, every piece of spam has been blocked here; the only hassle I have is occasionally having to clear the spam folder.

Stephanie's post also made me think about how much spam there seems to be in other comment threads. Spammers have always inhabited Internet discussions, but I have noticed a huge increase in the amount of spamming in threads all around the Internet these past few months, especially on news sites. Sometimes I'm not sure if the spam is littering the legitimate comments or the legitimate comments are littering the spam! I don't always read the comments now unless I know they've been moderated. Maybe it's just me.

Has anyone besides me and Stephanie had to block any spam or suffered an increase of it lately?