After switching from BadBehavior+Spam.module back to Akismet, I assumed I'd be in for a bit of an onslaught of spam. I was braced for impact. I can't believe the sheer volume of sustained attempted spam comments that are constantly being flung against this blog, 24/7 now. It's peaked at several attempts per second, which was adding a bit of a load to the server as it struggled to thwart the forces of evil.
Shortly after switching to Akismet, and enabling the experimental spam detection, I was seeing this:
Now, that might not look like much, but it suggests that Akismet was having to reject attempts several times per minute. Fast forward 24 hours, and I see this:
Again, not looking like much, but the interval between Akismet interventions is getting longer. Either the spammers are slowly starting to give up, or this is just a natural lull. I mean, there can be several minutes now without an attempted spamment posting. Entire minutes!
Now, the downside of Akismet is that I can't use it on any of my campus projects. The cost of licensing Akismet for the number of sites we have would be prohibitive, given our budget asymptotically approaching zero dollars (CDN).