Currently, I moderate comments to my blog. I'd like to automate a bit to reduce the amount of comment spam and was wondering what are the best options and/or plugins to assist in reducing comment spam? Thank you
Yeah definitely start with Akismet and then there are plugins that do captchas, questions, math problems, etc to confirm the commenter is human.
Would akismet by itself be sufficient, or should I be using a captcha/math problem as well. Looking at some of the more popular blogs that get large traffic volumes, I don't see them using captchas, so I'm wondering if akismet would be enough. The only thing they do is moderate comments.
those popular blogs are not only using akismet, they are also using their own customized anti-spam plug-in as far as I assess it. Install akismet and you will get the answer to your question.
I'm going to start with Akismet. Just curious, these anti-spam plugins that you reference, do you have examples of some potential ones they may be using?
If you are not getting much traffic from search engines, Akismet alone will be enough since most spams identified by other blogs will be automatically blocked on your blog. If your site is getting more and more contents indexed on search engines, you should take an extra approach since new spams that might not have been stopped by other blogs will be dropped at your blog first. Instead of moderating every comment manually, I would suggest you to allow commenting without moderation after first approval. It is one of the options under Comments of Wordpress.
i currently use defensio, and it works a charm. currently defensio gives me 99% accuracy at detecting comment spam.
Here are the 3 plugins that I use that have significantly reduced spam on my blog and what I install/configure on all my clients' WordPress blogs: Akismet Comment Timeout Simple Trackback Validation