If the comment text has no links, and the name/email doesn’t contain a URL, then it’s probably not spam.

On the other hand, many WordPress blogs are configured to require moderation of all comments from commenters who have not had a comment previously approved. So, spammers may be taking the tack of posting one, innocuous comment in order to get around this first-comment moderation. So, for a borderline comment, just be sure to watch for any future, spam comments from the same email address (assuming such comments get past Akismet).

Glad your site is back up and running – I was reading the comments and it brought to mind a question I’ve had that maybe you or your community can give me some direction on.
From time to time I look at the comments in my que and wonder if they are spam or if the people commenting use English as a second language! Some of the comments are so strange – like these two…
“I just love the way you write, its clear and easy to understand, and your posts are not fluffy and very informative, thanks for posting.” Or “After reading you site, Your site is very useful for me .I bookmarked your site!”
What do you look for to determine if a comment is from a spammer or not? If I get a comment like the above with no links in the comment, but with a kind of spammy-looking email address, should I spam the comment?
I don’t want to be rude to anyone – I’m thrilled when people comment, but I don’t want to do anything to help a spammer either.
Anyone want to weigh in? Thanks.

Thinking of DoS attacks, every page request for a WordPress blog requires PHP/MySQL to load, so depending on how much horsepower your server has it sometimes doesn’t take much to make a server go down. If you’re using shared server where you don’t have access install real caching such as APC on your server, then you’re only option is a caching plugin. Even if you use a caching plugin your blog still uses CPU/memory because PHP/MySQL still load. There are some caching plugins that do true caching with very complicated mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess file, but using such caching means you cannot use a lot of the cool plugins that update dynamically (twitter and rating plugins come to mind).

If you have full control of your server, you’re better off installing APC so you get true caching of PHP in memory. There are many other tweaks you can make to MySQL as well to facilitate caching of the most queried data. If you have the ability to do these things, there’s absolutely no reason to use a caching plugin since these applications like APC do the caching at a much higher level.

For blog feeds, I wrote a plugin called Static Feed that lets you serve your primary feeds as static XML files. This gives you the advantage of being able to serve your feeds even if your PHP/MySQL fail due to a DoS attack. I use it to remove the extra CPU/Memory load from having WordPress dynamically re-create the XML feeds every time the feeds are requested. The Static Feed plugin works by saving an XML copy of your feed any time you edit, add or delete blog posts. If you’re only writing 1-3 blog posts a day, you’re only resulting in a handful of MySQL queries to your database and saving a lot of CPU/Memory usage from loading PHP. Best part is my Static Feed plugin can either be configured for permalink style feeds (e.g. example.com/feed/) or Moveable Type style (e.g. example.com/index.xml).

Most of the default settings are good enough, and I bet that folks in the Forums would answer any questions you might have :)

For a site like wptavern which is a regular resource for wordpressers, cache should be a requirement.

Actually, that’s a bit of exaggeration since its hosted on a shared enviornment and b/w is not a problem but still, it will reduce cpu cycles.

Yes, they can be abused; yes, that abuse must be mitigated.

No, they should not be disabled.