My blog has been receiving spam in what looks to be a new wave of spam attacks. First, the spammers seed the whitelist by posting apparently innocuous comments with no URLs, or with a URL that doesn't contain spam. Then, once they're in, they wait a bit and then throw the switch. The spam starts a'comin' and it sneaks through Spam Karma 2. Very annoying.
One thing I really like about SK2 is that it is standalone - it doesn't rely on any network connection or other systems to flag stuff as spam. It just tracks IP addresses, user agents, and sniffs the content and URL for attempted comments.
But, that might be its weak point as well - by not harnessing the power of The Cloud, it's more vulnerable to these kinds of guerrilla spam insurgencies. Once someone using Akismet has flagged someone as an evil spammer, everyone automattically benefits from that, without having to each individually flag the spammass as a jerkwad.
SK2 has served me well for quite some time. Here's the current stats report:
Over 200,000 spams dealt with. But the number of moderations required is getting inconvenient - not impossible, but it's becoming something I need to manage rather than just fire-and-forget, the way things used to be.
Now, with Akismet enabled instead, I'm at the mercy of The Cloud, but that might not be a bad thing...