Good grief. On the hottest day since records began this month, I’ve been sweating over a hot keyboard upgrading a bunch of clients Wordpress installations to the latest version. On the way I found one that had been infected with nearly 5000 spammey comments, of which Akismet had managed to snare around 2000. Considering the number of sites involved that’s not too bad.

Fortunately all the comments were held pending moderation and approval.
A quick zap of the relevant database table consigned the garbage to burn in virtual hell while the client sailed serenely on with his business, unaware that his blog was potentially punting a veritable cornucopia of snake oils and porn movies.

All part of the service.

If you’re running a Wordpress install earlier than 2.8.4, upgrade now before the spammers move in. Earlier versions have security issues that have been patched in 2.8.4.