There has been a lot of and increasing comment spam on the blog engine and it finally reached a critical amount to put a stop instead of just trashing tens and then hundreds of comments. Before I already restricted comments to registered users only and it did not help much, then I disabled XML-RPC since it was second guess about spam source.
Then came a moment to sort things out and find that spam comes as pingbacks. However, the global option to disable pingbacks appeared to have no effect on existing content so spam kept coming in and the most recent hit is to take the database to phpMyAdmin and execute the following SQL statement:
UPDATE `wordpress_posts` SET `ping_status` = ‘closed’
to hopefully stop the dirt. Unfortunetely it’s clear it’s not the latest round of the resistance to spam as the bots would one day start registering as users…