I have to go through the inbox to approve new comments. When I set to auto-approve, I get overwhelmed with spam. As is, I still get spam but it’s manageable.
Usually the spam is uninteresting but this one caught my eye:
At first this seemed reasonable enough: law firm is desperate for business, spams blogs to raise its Google ranking. But what’s with the writing in the actual comment? It’s incoherent but it doesn’t look computer-generated. My guess is that the law firm in Massachusetts hired a company that promised to raise their Google rankings, and that this company hired some non-English-speaking foreigners to search through the web and write some spam comments. If anyone actually reads the comments, they might get the impression that this law firm is staffed by illiterates . . . but, as we all know, nobody reads blog comments!
P.S. I followed the link (sorry!) and came across this:
I guess if they’re going to use a tragedy as an excuse to troll for Facebook hits, I shouldn’t be surprised that they’d spam a statistics blog.
P.P.S. Sometimes people email to tell me that their comment did not appear on the blog. If so, it almost certainly got trapped in the spam filter and I never saw it.
On a moderate-traffic site that I used to run (somewhat more comments than this blog but probably less spam because it wasn’t WordPress), we used a system that went like this:
1. Commenter submits their comment.
2. Website queries Akismet in real-time for a spam classification.
3. If Akismet says spam, it pops up with a CAPTCHA to confirm the comment. Otherwise, the comment is posted.
That meant that almost no spam made it through to the site, but essentially all real comments did with a minimum of inconvenience to anyone.
I guess your problem is that the spam filter has a lot of false negatives, though, which this doesn’t help with.