Nothing like having 350+ comments in the moderation queue to start off the new year. This is by far the biggest comment spam attack I’ve ever had here. I’ve noticed a couple of things as a result of this attack. One, this was done from a wide range of IP addresses in a fairly short period of time, so most likely a bot. Two, I will have to got with more aggressive anti-spam methods here. Even though it looks like all of the spam was tagged for moderation, it is a paid having to go through that many, even in WordPress. Which leads me to number three, the comment moderation on my WordPress install is completely useless after more than 297 comments are in the queue. Why you ask? Because even though there are still more than 300 comments in the queue, it only displayed up to the start of 298 and then finished the page. This means that the ‘moderate’ button at the bottom of the page is never displayed. I’m not sure if this is a bug in WordPress, or a specific limitation of my install (system not beefy enough, strange MySQL problem, strange PHP problem, etc).
If I get a chance I’ll try to setup a test system to throw 300+ comments into and see what happens. In the mean time I’m definitely going to go after this problem with something more than just renaming the script that posts comments.
UPDATE 1 Jan 2005 @ 7:40pm: Ick, another 50+ spam comments. These actually got through though, because they only had 1 link in each one. I was hoping to get additional spam protection done this week, I’ll have to bump that up to the next day or two.