The volume of inbound comment spam has suddenly increased from “annoying” to “completely ridiculous” and exceeded my capacity to deal with it manually. So I’ve done what I probably should have done in the first place and enabled the Akismet anti-spam plugin that came bundled with this WordPress distribution. It seems to be working, but I haven’t done much checking to verify that it isn’t also filtering out legitimate comments with the spam.
If you find your comments being erroneously blocked, please contact me directly via e-mail at ‘aroth [dot] bigtribe [at] gmail [dot] com’ and I will see what I can do to tweak the spam filter settings.