Why do I have an extraordinary number of spam comments?

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  tonnard · Member · Jan 7, 2014 at 6:37 pm

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  When checking my Askimet stats I noticed a huge huge number of caught spam comments (234,392 in the past 6 months), while I don’t even have that many posts on my site. Is there a reason for this? Of course there is no problem as long as it is all caught, but it made me curious what could be going wrong.

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  eurello · Staff · Jan 8, 2014 at 6:58 pm

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  Hi there – I agree that is a lot! I note they are all from December, when you had a stats spike because of a referral from another blog. I also note that that blog looks to have sometimes been approving spam comments, which makes the blog a big target for further spam comments. That might explain why spammers targeted your blog after that — hoping that you also would approve them.

  At this point, I wouldn’t worry about it, since it looks like Akismet caught it all. But if you notice a problem in future, please do let us know. :)

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  tonnard · Member · Jan 12, 2014 at 9:50 am

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  Thank you. It wasn’t only in December (though majority was), but I understand the point; the reason is referrals by other sites. Thanks for having a look!