Anyone can subscribe to the RSS feed on any public blog. Be aware that there are human beings who get paid to post spam as well as robotic programs that post spam. There's nothing unusual about what you are getting. We all get it.

The vast and overwhelming majority of all so-called information on the internet is spam. Over 80% of all so-called comments submitted to .wordpress.com blogs every day are spam.

The worst of all spam containing malware and viruses is not sent to us. It's removed as it could bring down many blogs if opened.

On the spam that Akismet catches it takes only seconds to click "empty spam" and you don't even have to click "empty spam" if you don't want to. Akismet will maintain comments it has caught for 15 days from the time they were received, and then it will delete the comment automatically.

If you get spam that slips by Akismet then mark it as spam (do not delete it) and over time Akismet will learn it's spam.

There is no such thing as eliminating all spam but Akismet works very well. For more information please take the time to read "5 things every blogger should know about spam" on this page Akismet: How it works http://akismet.com/how/

I the past two days or so, i have noticed a unbelievable upsurge in spam attacks on my blog. It seems these new ones are some how managing to pass through the wordpress askimet spam filtration system.

My askiment spam system is turned on, but still it seems to come through. My blog is filling with spam comments. In the past few days alone i had to manually turn 50+ approx comments to spam. Manually changing them to spam.

Can someone help me in reducing the spam attacks please? It is becoming annoying now and i would like this to stop!

I have a similar problem to yours: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27329&replies=30#post-196314

;-)

Let me know what I need to do. Thank you!

Signed,

Very Unhappy With Typepad at the Moment

I, personally, HATE Typepad. It's so 1998.

I miss you guys. ;-)

Hope this helps.

I'm supporting Barack Obama for president.

Since this "Related Links" feature was foisted upon us, for the first time, I've encountered a slew of really awful racist replies to my pro-Obama threads requiring deletion.

This never happened before.

C'mon Matt - you guys can do better then this!

My own response has been to post a warning to visitors on my 'About' page: no endorsement of auto-generated links is implied.

I've parsed enough text from Matt and Automattic not to rule out anything or rule in anything till I've tested it; it's just that they have blind spots the same as everyone.

I haven't made newer posts, but older posts have been linked and I've been getting a small trickle of traffic from those links. It's possible they may have been linked before I disabled the feature, but I don't think that's good enough.

kiefferceramics, read my post. I said very clearly that I disabled the feature.

matt, blocking individual blogs won't make much of a difference when there are multiple blogs of the blocked kind out there. For this to be effective, one has to go out and search for white supremacist blogs and keep searching for them, since as WP boasts, thousands of new blogs are created every month... and who has the time to do that?

This whole thing is placing undue burden on the shoulders of people who mind their own business, and throwing copious amounts of bait to trolls, stalkers, and abusers.

apparently, not much...

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27302

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27298

What, if anything, is WP doing to deal with the high potential for abuse that this feature brings?