The onslaught just keeps coming. It's on pace to easily meet 20,000 spam comments in 24 hours. I had a very small handful of false negatives, but they were easily dispatched by clicking a couple of checkboxes on an admin page.
20,000 spam attempts. Peaking at multiple attempts per second, with over 500 spam bots simultaneously spidering/spamming the site. Drupal seems to be holding its own, triggering throttles to shut down higher-load functions so the site remains responsive.
And Akismet is dutifully blocking the roaches from getting through. Their success rate just keeps dropping - down to 0.1% success rate, and even that is only temporary, until I manually remove the small handful that gets by Akismet's watchful gaze. The spammer's effective success rate is exactly 0% - not asymptotally approaching 0, but exactly 0. Zero. Absolute Zero. Cold heat death for spam.
I'm pretty sure they're sticking around here because the bots think they are succeeding - Drupal accepts the comment, so the bots think it worked. What they don't realize is that the comment is immediately unpublished by the Akismet module - as soon as the Akismet retuns its spam flag.
Thankfully, Dreamhost appears to be handling it like a champ. Not even breaking a sweat. I'm pretty sure that if this blog was still back on GoDaddy's servers, it would have curled up into the fetal position and mumbled quietly to itself...