Read what frogblog had to say today on spam (the meat (by)product). Truly amazing.
It turns out that our ISP, Free.fr, is tightening things up. They offer free hosting, with a lot of nice features, but have suddenly blocked outgoing port 80 calls from their servers (due to some kind of abuse related to people linking to themselves or something).
Anyway, this measure rendered the Akismet Spam-blocker useless.
So I’ve installed WP-SpamFree on our blogs and it seems to be working, in that it lets our test comments go through, and blocks everything else. We can’t see what was blocked, so we have no way of knowing if legitimate comments are being unfairly victimized.
I’m not crazy about the way this plug-in does what it does, and I’m quite sure that it won’t take long before the spambots defeat it, but in the meantime, it’ll have to do, and it’s better than having to delete dozens of porn and pharmaceutical spam messages every day…