In a little over a day of blocking comment spammers who exploit open proxies, I’ve had 13 comment spammers make attempts that actually made it to my moderation queue. Considering that this value is about the average of spam attempts I was getting per hour, this is a vast, vast improvement.

Now, not all Weblog comment spammers are using open proxies, but many are because they can use them as a scattershot approach. Now, mind you, the DSBL isn’t perfect, either, but I’ve installed their software locally and will take offenders’ IPs and test them. Perhaps there are some open proxies not in the DSBL. If I’m going to leverage off of their list, I should participate in helping to keep up the list, no?

You can bet that I’ll be rolling out the plugin in all my WP installs!