I have no idea why the sudden uptake, but spammers seem to be on a ball this week. Yesterday they broke a new record, with 239 thousand spams being caught by Akismet. That’s more than we used to get in an entire month.
Update: The following day we got 314,192 spams, but it has since returned [...]
Tobias Schlitt has added Akismet support to the PEAR package Services_Trackback, which he writes about here.
PEAR is a “framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.” It’s used by a lot of PHP developers much like CPAN is for Perl.
Akismet had a DB problem earlier today that caused it to be slower than normal to respond to requests for free users. Because of the way the WP plugin is written (with a very low timeout), this may have allowed spam comments to hit the moderation queue.
Everything should be back to normal now, and please [...]
