My, that is a lot of spam…
I have been running a personal blog for many years- arguably since about 1997. I think I switched to WordPress in 2005 after previously managing with a static HTML page and then a PHPNuke website. I started getting comment ‘spam’ shortly after I started using WordPress: like email spam, spam comments are irritating messages that aren’t really created by actual people who have something meaningful to say.
Thankfully, the folks at Automattic who make WordPress provided something called Akismet to ‘block’ or filter spam comments. I activated Akismet, and managing spam became more or less a memory… but the numbers, goodness… the numbers are huge.