Is a very good question, and one I've wondered about myself more than once.

As far as I know it is working. Let see what the sysadmins say about the status of the service.

BTW, have you reported something lately?

I can't say I've reported anything in a while, but neither have I been hit with any spam comments in recent times. Maybe it's got to the point where so many terms have been blocked now, that most eventualities have been covered off.

That's what I thought in the first place, but more than a year and a half since the last update also looks suspicious.

That's what I thought, too - it is worth checking ;-)

Just ran the update process with the demo-version here at b2evolution.net.
The time stamp after updating: "New latest update timestamp: 2009-03-10 05:27:28"

BTW why do you run version 6.5.0 at your demo?

I had to run the update several times before the full list was downloaded on the demo (same on my own test installs). Eventually the date ended up at 2014-02-24 21:10:18 as per the first post ^^

One interesting thing I did note whilst trying this, was that the demo site shows 121 pages of blocked terms, where my live blog currently shows 465 pages.My blog is nearly 10 years old now, and though I will have a good few thing blocked locally that aren't on the blacklist, it doesn't account for that big a differential.

Demo site is still pending to be upgraded to the latest version.

@chris_of_arabia well the difference of listed items between the demo site and your site is huge. Not sure if this is the case, but elements deleted from the central blacklist are not deleted from your database with every update. So, maybe 10 years of going back and forth have resulted in that difference.

Just to confirm, I guess you did, but did you use the same number of items per page when checked both sites ?

I must admit, I'd not directly compared them, but it turns out that both are set on the default 20 items per page.

I'm not too concerned about the difference, but I would be curious about the deletions from the central blacklist. The only way I could see aligning them again, would be to delete the table holding them on my install, and re-import, but that would remove those things I've specifically blocked, but never made it to the central list. I guess that unless that puts a performance load on my site, there's probably not much point even considering it.

I just did a very quick trawl through my blocked list, and it becomes apparent that over the years I've blocked quite a lot of domain names, and looking at those names, it's probably a LOT of referrer spam

@chris_of_arabia I think it's worth for you to keep your historical data, no matter if it's not perfectly synchronized with the central blacklist. In fact, I think that's the ideal scenario, grab things from a centralized list, but also have your own entries.

The central antispam system currently blocks a fair amount of spam even without updating it.

We are in the process of rewriting the system in a more modern way but there's always something more urgent that gets in the way ;)

In the new system you'll be able to chose your "central" (or start your own) if you don't want to use the one from b2evolution.net. Also the one the b2evolution.net will be more restrictive and no longer accept reports from newbies (who faithfully report "anal" every day without understanding it will block "analog", "analytics", "canal", and on and on...)