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 to normal levels.
Akismet 
yes, I noticed the increment of spam comments recently too.
I’ve noticed the massive upsurge of spam. Akismet has caught all but three on my blog, and those were caught by the moderation queue.
Incidentally, I just activated Akismet yesterday… ooops ! LOL.
Well, Askismet isn’t the only one – I’ve been hammered with spam for the past few days and it was out of the blue.
As Paul Short mentioned, there’s probably some new spam tool out on the market.
Yeah, just a little while ago, I had to turn on WP-Cache to help bring my server’s load down.
I have also been attacked by spammer this past few days. Getting over a hundred spams a day.
Yup. Noticed it too. A few got through, but they were easily dealt with.
Heh. I set up a wordpress blog just TWO days ago and akismet has already caught some spam.
As long as it works. It’s fine with me.
Most of these spams have an URL filled out – and the spammers are using a fairly short list of domains. I’ve modified wp-comments-post.php to recognise these and redirect the spammers to a 30 Mb download on a public server that can handle a large load. As a result, any spammer that points his botnet at my weblog sees his botnet choke on a set of downloads and slow down to a crawl. It’s funny to see how fast they take my weblog off their list of sites to spam…
I activated Askimet about a week ago, not having any spam before, and now it’s stopped 3 this week.
Thank you, guys for Akismet otherwise I would have spent my whole day in manually dealing with these spam comments.
That’s why i love akismet 🙂
Good Job, i catched also some spam..
I noticed earlier in the week that my junk email box was suddenly receiving more mail too. I don’t know what’s going on, but there is a general increase in spam (email and comment).
I’ve been slammed — I cleared out my queue several times a day. I just checked today for the first time since midnight…
What exactly is fioricet, and why is it so cheap?
Thank you, Akismet! (Not a one has slipped through.)
wow..not a single spam yesterday..
thats strange
Spam has been growing but Akismet has been holding its own. Great job!
I have got massive amounts of spam this week on my site, i only integrated akismet (using the php5 class by alex) to the comments system on my site last weekend and it’s caught about 100 spam comments this week alone!!!
Thanks for this great service! – Now i need to script it so i only need to press one button to delete them all myself 🙂 At least they’re not being published on the site.
However, it did miss one spam comment today 😮 and one a couple of days ago on my WP blog (which were submitted to the akismet server!)
I have 2 different blogging domains; one with WordPress and Akismet, the second with MovableType and MT-Blacklist. Akismet let 0 spam emails through, the other let 9 spam through!
Go Akismet!!
Thank you Akismet, it’s the best spam plugin I gotten. 😀
Akismet has protected your site from 1308 spam comments.
Yeah, I don’t use Akismet (although that’s not hugely relevant, the spam still gets SUBMITTED, I just prefer Spam Karma 2 as a post-submission filter) but over the last month or so spammers have been really hammering my (wordpress.org-powered) blog, to the extent that I was approaching my monthly bandwidth limit for the first time since I established my site several years ago. One install of Bad Behaviour (blocks the little [censored]s before they can get on my site and drain my bandwidth) later and my bandwidth usage is a third of what it was. Damn spammers! I hate to think what WP.com’s bandwidth usage has gone up by, if a small barely-registers-on-google site like mine has attracted so many spammers.
Thanks, Akismet for a great spam blocker. As the blog gets more popular, more spam is coming. Akismet has yet to let a piece of spam through. Thanks for making it so easy.
Wow thats alot of spam I am glad someone is stoppingit all. Thanks for the great job thus far and look forward to hearing many more great stories like thisone.
Wow thats a heck of alot of spam, just set up my wordpress blog awhile back and Akismet has already block over 200 thanks a bunch!
Who ever wrote this script is a star! Today it had blocked 55 Spam comments on one of my blogs alone. Great Guys!!!!! I see the 1,000 mark on that blog in reach.