I am so tired of dealing with comment spammers. Even though I use custom software that I wrote to run this blog, I still use the Akismet comment spam detector run by the boys & girls at Wordpress. The Akismet system is an awesome tool and catches a ton of spam for me but a good amount still gets through.
I began logging every time my software found a spam message around 6 months ago. After 2 weeks I had caught nearly 12,000 spam messages. I would sit and watch my logs just fly with spammers using custom software to bang away at my server trying to litter my blog with comment spam.
I finally wrote a script to block IP addresses that had posted more than 15 spam messages over the last 7 days. It would use the pf firewall that I use on all my FreeBSD servers.
Since then I have blocked over 1,000 hosts (IP addresses) from even connecting to my server. That is totally amazing how fast spammers move and how many servers they have in play to hammer even a tiny blog like my own. Obviously spam is a big problem and it is no longer limited to just email.
I eventually had to turn off Trackback support because the spammers were hitting that as well. The Akismet filter isn't designed to work with trackback requests but I was still able to block quite a number of those requests. I eventually disabled it because it appeared to be under some sort of bot attack because it got to be so bad that it effected the performance of my server.
When deciding to blog for fun, or profit, there are other things you have to consider other than just what you will write about. Get in touch with that inner geek and it will help you down the line.