Comment spam is one of the banes of blogging. I have blogged nearly a decade now, longer than blog has been a word. A few years back I switched from manually editing the HTML to Movable Type. It allowed folks to comment on my posts, which was very cool. That worked until the spammers figured out how to increase their Google pagerank by posting comment spam. MT soon became a liability as there was no good way to control comment spam (I tried many) so I disabled the comments feature (as did many).
Soon thereafter, WordPress arrived and I switched. It included a plugin architecture and plugins appeared like ants to a picnic. I tried several comment spam plugins and settled on SpamKarma. It uses a complex (and configurable) heuristic system to determine if a message is spam or not. The goal is that real users get their comments posted immediately and do not need to jump through hoops while spammers are ruthlessly deterred. It works, and it resolved all my problems with comment spam. And we all lived happily ever after…until last month.
As WordPress evolved, I installed newer versions and finally one day, SpamKarma broke, sort of. It still worked, but I would often get emails whining about a new comment spam. Today I installed the latest version of SpamKarma. I’m quite confident that now I can go back to life assured that people can post comments to my blog with ease but spammers get a swift kick in the groin.
If you blog, this is a solution I recommend.