One of the things you might have noticed here is that there’s no comment-spam. Oh, there’s plenty of spam comments submitted, but it doesn’t really make it through. There are two things at work here against the comment-spammer.
The first is the Akismet plugin for Wordpress. It might not be 100% successful at tracking its own statistics, but it is extremely successful at stopping comment-spam. Far more successful than a CAPTCHA. It’s worth a glance through the spam folder each day looking for the occasional false positive, but they’re few and far-between, because:
The second is that no matter how hard or cleverly comment-spammers work to make their initial messages innocuous, thoughtful, valid, and generally worth approving so that you can open the door to their comments – the fact is, that they’re spammers so you actually generally get dozens or hundreds of identical messages from the same address, or from multiple addresses.
Shoot. Self. Foot.
No matter how clever your average comment spammer tries to be, or how clever the tools and products are that they use to spam with, the fact is that they’re doing it in bulk and that’s what foils them.
I suppose — technically — that you’ve ideally been oblivious to the lack of comment spam
While there’s a torrent of it, you hopefully have been blissfully unaware of the absence.
Here’s a little peek of what it is like to get attacked by comment spam:
http://dantonsideways.com/?p=5
The “identical messages” thing is probably temporary. You don’t see that in email spam anymore.
I wonder how much of this is for human eyeballs versus spider eyeballs (SEO)?
BTW, Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab blog recently got hit with a pass of “indentical messages” comment spam.