I was idly checking logs, and noticed that my MT-Blacklist plugin has been a busy little beaver blocking comment spam. Interestingly, although I have about 800 lines of regex's and banned sites, just two lines in the list of blocks seem to be doing the lion's share of the work:
(diet|penis)[\w-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}
and (imagine the following is all one line)
(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|
xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}
I have no idea whether this just reflects a particularly active spammer or two this week, or whether it's something more meaningful.
I don’t know about the second one, but the first one’s been hitting my site an average of two to three times a day. It’s really just enough to be annoying and nothing more, and doesn’t trigger MT 2.661’s built-in comment spam blocking features. (Come to think of it, it’s also a little more subtle in that it leaves only one comment at a time, instead of bombarding the site with dozens of comments to as many posts as possible.)
I am very happy with the MT-Blacklist plugin. I haven’t upgraded from 2.64 (although I added the patches), mostly because I haven’t needed to.