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The reason to keep marked spam is to have Antispam Bee double check the “poster’s” IP if ‘Look in the local spam database’ is enabled.
If the IP of your spam comments are all different, it cannot catch them.

I don’t think it does any text analysis as for example advanced mail spam plugins do.

Most of my spam comments get trapped in the CSS Hack, if you are not subject to the EU laws, you might also want to enable the Tornevall public antispam database.

Simon,
Thanks for the info, however, we’ve tried that and more possible solutions. I can confirm that CSSHack was the most frequently used, but apparently someone has studied up on how AntiSpam Bee works and has found a way around their algorithms, at least for now. But that’s the way it is with all anti-spam / anti-virus battles, all that back and forth. Unfortunately I have to comply with others wishes as well and have disabled this solution for now and installed a different one. We’ll just have to see how long that one holds up.

I’m currently playing around with the new RegEx functionality that was added in 2.5.2 (adding stuff to the _is_regexp_spam function in antispam-bee/antispam_bee.php).

Maybe I’ll be able to at least cage the spammers that are hammering my blog from changing IPs (but mostly CN).

Hi Simon – can you expand upon your comment about the EU laws and Tornevall? What’s the issue there? Your answer might make my next question redundant but…

Can anybody explain why the ‘Use a public antispam database’ checkbox on Antispam Bee is optional – is it that it slows the site/commenting process down for the user when enabled?

I don’t know the exact details (and I wasn’t able to find the right search terms), but there is a privacy protection law in the EU that (unencrypted?) transmission of IP addresses is not allowed, because it is considered personally identifiable information (PII).

To query Tornevall if a specific IP address is in the black list, it has to be sent..

The “Country Check” on the other hand cuts off the last byte of the address before sending (so like “10.0.0.X”), which makes it no longer PII and this is OK by that laws.

Sergej has written a bit more about what this means form ASB here (German only):
https://playground.ebiene.de/antispam-bee-wordpress-plugin/#dnsbl_check
https://plus.google.com/110569673423509816572/posts/ZMU6RfyRK29

Thanks for your reply Simon. I enabled Tornevall and it seems to have reduced the spam that was slipping through significantly. If there is a legal issue, I wonder if the liability lies with the plugin developer rather than those using it.