Spam now outnumbering visitors by 30 to 1 — why?

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  carolang · Member · Apr 16, 2013 at 1:37 am

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  Something apparently happened a while ago that has caused me to get only 5 or so visitors in a day or a week but right now there are 142 spam messages! Why is this happening and what can I do about it?

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  helper-heroponriki · Member · Apr 16, 2013 at 8:11 pm

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  Hi there,

  Sorry about the trouble, and thanks for reporting the issue.

  If a lot of the spam comments have a common string of text, I suggest adding that string to your blacklist:
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist

  You can use the comment author’s name, IP address, web site, as well as the comment itself. Please make sure the word is not something contained in non-spam comments. For example, if you enter “press” as a blacklisted word, “WordPress” will match.

  Also, please mark those comments as spam instead of just deleting. Our Akismet anti-spam engine tries to learn from a pattern of the comments that are marked as spam.

  For more information about dealing with unwanted comments, visit:
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

  I hope that helps!