In reply to mark k..

@mark k "I am sure the spammers don’t use google" - when I checked all the major spambots did.

“Spambots don’t need much effort to identify your site as wordpres, after all 1 in 4 site is wordpress”. I said “find site” for brevity - sorry my bad on clarity. To expand:

Knowing there is “25% chance” a site is Wordpress is not sufficient to automate spam, so you can prevent spambots targeting your site. To work effectively bots need the URLs of individual posts (with comments open) on hundreds of sites. They create lists of victim URLs (which are then auto spammed) by Googling for Wordpress footprints and scraping the URLs from the results. E.g. to generate a list of target URLs for posts about cats with comments open you would use the search term ' “Leave a reply” “Powered by Wordpress” cats '

As I explained in my article (link in my previous comment) you can “prevent” your site being identified by spambots. It seems to work for me, when moderating comments there are only 2 or 3 (probably human) spam comments a month across 3 WP sites (I guess I used to get between 50 and 150 a month that weren’t blocked by anti-spam plugin).

I highlight that my comments are moderated which I guess discourages human spam. I don’t use Askimet - it wasn’t necessary when using the old version of “Spam free Wordpress (SFW)”. Unfortunately SFW was castrated a few years ago to encourage use of the commercial version – so I now use in-house code – it doesn’t log so I’ve no idea how much it blocks.