I just upgraded my Akismet plugin for the first time in a long time and this version gives me all sorts of fun stats about the spam that comes through here (they don’t count my posts as SPAM but maybe they should consider that).
Anyway, the first one was somewhat startling to me, perhaps it shouldn’t be but it was anyway, I had to go back and look when I told wordpress to close comments off on posts older than 90 days (that was done entirely to limit impact of spam see side bar I have a note about re-opening comments if you wish to comment on an older post for a temporary amount of time.
So fortunately my apache logs go back to December 19 2013 as when I did this. Behold the impact!
Impact of disabling comments on posts older than 90 days
The last 5 months of 2013 generated 97,055 spam, vs the first 8 months(so far) of 2014 has generated 6,360 spam (not even as much as August 2013 alone).
Next up is the all time spam history, which just goes back to 2012, I guess they were not collecting specifics on stats before that I have been a subscriber to this service for longer than that for sure.
TechOpsGuys spam all time
I’ve never really managed spam here, I rarely look at what is being blocked well there is so much(even now).