Since I installed the Akismet spam plugin about a year ago, it has caught 39,900 spam comments. These comments would otherwise have appeared on the site. To put that into perspective, the site currently has about 4700 legitimate comments.
As a result of 2 new plugins I added to the site a week ago, all spam comments have been blocked. Every time I check the Akismet spam queue now, it’s empty. This means I don’t have to waste time paging through hundreds of spam remarks every day. It also means there could occasionally be a problem posting legitimate remarks. If so, email me at webmaster – at – thestressblog.com – don’t email Scott, he’s not a nerd and won’t be able to help you.
For those of you who run your own WordPress blogs and want to know what I did to block spam, listen up. First, activate Akismet and grab a WordPress API key to enable it. WP has its own spam filter and also provides Akismet, so that’s two down, two to go. Install Bad Behavior and Comment-Timeout next. Bad Behavior tries to block scripts from accessing the site, and since spam is left behind by scripts, it is very effective. Comment-Timeout closes old posts to comments. Most spam comments are left in old posts, so this plugin corrects that vulnerability.