So my new policy is to keep spam ‘on file’ for three days. It’s filed away as spam so no one sees it, but it’s good for analysis and such, to protect against future spam. Several times a day, I run a little script to delete spam older than three days and optimize the tables, to keep things running fast.

So this table is particularly telling of the spam problem. Akismet is catching just about all of it, so it’s not a big problem for me per se, but the fact remains that, with three days of spam and something like nine months of legitimate comments, spam accounts for right around two-thirds of all comments on my blog. Wow-a-wee-wow!