Here at WordPress, all of the blogs are protected from spam by Akismet, which is a pretty good spam filter. Unfortunately, sometimes it allows trackbacks of a dubious nature to get through. (Trackbacks show up as comments.) The last week or so, I’ve been deleting these things as fast as I can but even I have to get some sleep 🙂
I’ll continue to delete them as I see them but that’s all I can do. I apologize in advance for the offensive material.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Sleep? What’s sleep?
Yeah, I know what you mean 😦
There are several wordpress plugins that allow you to close comments off after a certain period of time. I have mine set to close comments for all posts older than 75 days and all posts where there hasn’t been a comment posted for 60 days. Its cut down on the amount of spam that makes it past Askimet considerably.
Doug – we don’t have that option here at WordPress.com – can’t install any plug-ins. For self-installs, you can do that.
I’m going to send another feedback asking for that plug-in to be installed here.
I wasn’t sure if they allowed plugins on their hosted blogs or not. There are several out there that making running a WordPress blog much easier.
Good luck getting them to install it for you.
Yeah, I know. One thing that I can do is to ban IP addresses. Unfortunately, these things are coming from all over the place 😦
By the way, over 89,000 spam comments have been blocked here so overall, Aksimet does a good job.
vjp – I use WordPress too. My website does not get nearly as many comments as your, but I get more than enough spam. When the spam started getting worse, I decided to tighten down the controls using the Discussion Options. When I set it so that a comment author must have a previously approved comment, that stopped the spam from popping up before I reviewed it. Since most of your commenters probably have comment before, I imagine that would work for you too. Have you set that control?
No. I try not to do much to keep people from posting. I’d rather deal with the occasional run of trackbacks (like I had today) than to cut off folks from participating. Besides, I’m not really clear on whether the specific problem of trackbacks gets fixed when you do that.
I am not certain about trackbacks, but I have not been having that problem lately. So I guess it works.
I understand your concern about making it easy for people to post. I do not think there is an easy solution. Spam filters are like the locks we put on our houses. As much as we want to make it easy for family and friends to visit, we still put locks on our doors.