I'm sure many WordPress users may already know about this, if not are already using it, but since no one seems to be writing about this I just wanted to share my experience with the spam filter Akismet. Wow. Just... wow. I originally thought my setup of requiring my approval for new commentors was enough to handle the amount of spam comments on my blogs, but soon it wasn't. So I decided to implement the Akismet plugin that comes with WP. At first it was decent, it'd catch a spam maybe once a week. But tonight I checked on my spam filter and found a whopping TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN spam comments... almost 100 of which came in the last 3 days. And I had absolutely no hand in the filtering, Akismet did it all by itself. Akismet rules. If you're using WordPress and not using Akismet, you're doing yourself a huge disservice
I have to absoutely agree. Not one spam message has made it through Akismet on my blog since I activated it.
Spam does get through, and the spammers are getting cleverer. however because this is a community based tool it learns from the spam on other blogs as well as your own. Only a tiny % slip through and without Akismet, or one of the other tools, I probably would have either given up blogging or turned off comments by now. I'm proud that I have a clean blog, with no hoops to jump through if you want to comment.
Ya, some spam does get through. It may be because my site's only been around for a few months or because it's not huge yet, but maybe once a month ONE spam comment gets thru, but because I have WordPress set to require approval for any new users, it never goes public
I love Akismet. I have not had a single spam get through since installing it. I've had only one false positive.
Spam will get through, I had about 70 yesterday alone, but normally it's one every couple of weeks. I gave up looking for false positives ages ago, I'm far too nice a girl to go reading through the email addresses and urls of the commenters - I shudder to think what was actually written!