Wow, in just the few days the new version has been up, I've already seen a major reduction in the amount of spam comments I get. It used to be a few hundred a week, but in the last couple of days I've gotten a grand total of thirteen, eleven of which were automatically sent to my junk list. Looks like I may need to tinker with my junk filter a little bit in order to catch ones like those last two, though.
I'm not sure what happened to the other eighty-some spam comments I was expecting, though. My junk filter isn't set to actually delete anything, so where did they go? It would be too much of a coincidence that a bunch of spammers just happened to cut down their blog spam right exactly when we upgraded, so it must have something to do with the upgrade itself.
I wonder if they can detect the version of a Movable Type server before spamming it, and don't send as many to recent versions that have the anti-spam features? Though that's probably doubtful, considering that all along we had the nofollow plugin that makes spam links useless for improving google rankings, yet the spammers kept on firehosing us. It's probably more effort for them to target their spam in any way than simply to spew it out it blindly.
But whatever the reason, the amount of spam on my blog is way, way down. Now if only I could do that to my email...
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