I've been using b2evolution for about 6 months now, and I've never had any spam on my blog of any kind. The only "precaution" I have taken (other than updating my blacklist regularly) is to rename the comment_post.php file to something else, but looking back, I don't even know if that was necessary.

The one major difference I can see between my blog and most other blogs is that I don't ever ping any of the available services when I post. The purpose of my blog is for friends and family, who have been given the URL, and I've never been all that concerned with making it visible to the general public.

My website and blog have been indexed by most of the major search engines, and my blog posts can easily be found on Google, MSN, etc. I've had some traffic from the "general public" via that route, which is fine (I have nothing to hide), but so far, no SPAM of any kind.

So, my conclusion is that most of the spammers out there are using lists that are being pinged, not searching for specific content or filenames (unless renaming that one file really did help me), in order to find blogs to flood with comment and referrer SPAM.

Now, obviously, these lists serve a purpose and some people rely on them to bring traffic to their blogs, etc. I'm not suggesting that everyone quit pinging services like this, but there are probably a lot of people like me who are not as concerned about the general public finding their blogs. So, for those people, I thought I would point out my observation and recommend that you not ping any services if you don't really need to. It may do a great deal to prevent or reduce the SPAM on your site.

If anyone has information that contradicts this theory, please post it. I don't want to spread disinformation - just trying to help.