Getting hit pretty nastily over the past few days by spambots here -- not that anything has actually made it to the live pages, but my "junked comments" and "junked trackbacks" listings are long and nasty-looking -- various kills from the SpamBlocker plug-in for MT and from scripts trying to bypass the TinyTuring text CAPTCHA. And I have AutoBan blocking things on an IP level based on the junking filter -- and that's generating lots of access errors in the site error log.
All of which leads to occasional performance snafus around here, but the shields are holding and my animus toward the spammers remains unabated.
(I like this spambot slowdown method .. I might have to play with it some time.)
Discovered one reason why the junk comments were suddenly flooding in is that I had previously set TinyTuring to discard any comments that came in bypassing the validation text, but my table corruption error a week or so back reset the setting, so it was pushing them to junk. Yeesh.