I have blogged about comment spam until I’m blogged out.
The spam hasn’t stopped, but several different kinds of fixes have eased the problem. The one I’m not happy having to do is close off comments in the archives. For some odd reason, I feel the ’spammers’ won that round.
A couple of thousand pieces flooding in, is meager compared to the 46 thousand The Blog Herald received.

It appears help is on the way (again) for bloggers that use Movable Type/Typepad.
Essentially up to now, the average blogger has been on the defensive.
It appears Jay Allen, combater of spam has identified key vulnerabilities.

Recently, however, there have been a number of reports about the escalating effect of comment spam on Movable Type installations, especially evident in shared hosting environments. At first, we assumed that these problems were caused mainly on legacy systems (i.e. MT 2.x) running without the benefit of the modern anti-spam measures (e.g. TypeKey, comment moderation, MT-Blacklist v2.x, etc.) built to protect Movable Type installations. After further analysis and load testing, we’ve actually found that this is not the case.

In fact, we have found that there is a fairly major bug (in terms of effect, but not code size) which causes page rebuilding even in the case of a comment submission which would be moderated and hence should have no effect on the live page. This means that even if you are using comment moderation in Movable Type and even force moderation in MT-Blacklist, your server load is impacted just as if a comment had been posted to the live site. This bug has been fixed in development.

In addition, we have found another less severe instance of unnecessary database connections which would normally be associated with dynamic pages, even if dynamic templates are not in use. This would adversely affect any customer not using static pages by adding the overhead of dynamic files on top of the normal load caused by rebuilding of static files. This has also been fixed in development.

These two bugs are, in high probability, the causes of the extreme server loads that our customers have been experiencing under the load of a severe spam attack.

If spammers are smart enough to find holes, I think coders and smart enough to fix them. Blogging being what it is, any protection is better served being behind the scenes in a way that does not ask the reader to take an extra step or two. Allen says the upcoming patch and solution will work with all blog platforms.
And pigs fly. The Daily Whim is not very optimistic either. Usenets and email have been crippled, blogs are the current popular target.