For over two months now my blog has been under attack by spammers trying to post their links to pharmaceutical, gambling or mortgage sites in my comments in an attempt to boost their page ranking in the search engines. None of these comments have made it through.
Initially I was relying on the manual approval of every comment (which I still have turned on for any that get past my other defences), but that soon became tedious as their use of spam-bots increased and I was getting 10s of postings an hour, all the same but from different IP addresses.
So, I experimented with a number of spam-blocking tools for WordPress. The result of that experimentation was that I settled on a couple of tools from the same author:
Between them, these two tools have reduced the work in moderating comments to almost nothing. Most of the spam is deleted automatically by the spaminator tool, though I still have that one set to email me when it deletes a comment so that I can monitor what it deletes in case it picks a genuine comment. So far, it has never done that though. If you run a WordPress blog, I strongly recommend these two plugins.
January 8, 2005: Updated the links to Kitten’s tool home pages since they changed.