I always had a little bit of spam, but not a whole lot. I just marked it and went on. Over the last couple of weeks the spamming started to get out of hand. In fact, yesterday I got well over 300 spam comments that I marked.
I finally installed a spam filter. The reason I am mentioning this is that some of your comments may not get through. I apologise for this but I cannot spend 1-2 hours a day knocking out spam.