Over the course of the last few weeks, there has been a marked increase in spammers.  Specifically, blog comments and trackbacks have been the primary offenders.  It appears as though spammers have gotten bored or my traffic has increased just enough to make me an interesting target.  Or, maybe it just pissed them off when I started blocking their IP ranges (typically in China, South Korea, etc).  Regardless, I really hate these guys.

To combat the nuisance, I have disabled user registration since several spammers figured out they could register and have immediate access for publishing comments/trackbacks.  In addition, I have enabled Community Server spam scoring.  I'm not really sure why I didn't set it up in the first place.  It was one of those situations where I didn't want bother with it initially because I felt it was unnecessary.  For the last year or so, it wasn't.  But, things change.

With the current spam score configuration, I think it will alleviate a large majority of the problem.  However, as is the case with any scoring system, there is always the potential for false positives.