JSSpamBlock is (really) dead now?

After Paul Butler’s Announcement of the end of JSSpamBlock maintenance, I was not really worried about the plugin itself, as it still did its job in a perfect way. If you think back, there are enough unmaintained plugins around, doing their job perfectly within a current Wordpress installation.

But you know about theory and reality by now, because in this case, some of the comment functions JSSpamBlock was using were changed and rendered the plugin unusable. The root of the problem is the new possibility to reply to comments from within the administrative backend. But however - Paul is not maintaining the plugin anymore due to lack of interest.

But Spam is getting worse here and the plugin was quite a nice way for taking load off the Akismet system. The case is obvious: I can either try to fix the plugin, rewrite or fork it or try to maintain it.