There hasn’t been much spam on my blog for months, because MT-Blacklist was keeping it out.
However, the Blacklist log shows that there have been over 8,300 attempts to put comments and trackbacks on the blogs served by my MT installation (mine and Claire’s). For a few months, some porn outfit was trying to put up porn links in trackbacks. They attacked in waves, and would be good for several hundred hits a day when they were attacking. They got a few trackbacks a couple times in but I was lucky and caught them and updated my blacklist. I saw some common patterns in their trackbacks and was able to write Blacklist URL patterns to filter them. They tried to get around that, and more countermeasures. Then they stopped and they haven’t been heard of for a few weeks. There was another outfit that kept trying to post comments with links to multiple sites relating to gambling, alternative therapeutic drugs, cheap prescription drugs, and easy loans. For a long time I tended to get a doxen hits a day, increasing in the last two weeks to 20 or 30 hits a day. About three days ago, it dropped to nothing. From time to time there were some nuisance spammers with stealth posts or nonsense letters and other crap.
My guess is that the main offenders both have had server or ISP issues and have been trying to relocate. I don’t think they have given up on the spam trade or given up on spamming MT powered blogs, but who knows?