My earlier post on reaching 5000 spam comments captured by Akismet raised some interest, as several commenters with blogs of similar ages have suffered more like 30,000 spams and asked what my plugins were.

So, in approximate order of how they intercept spam, here they are:

Bad Behavior: This one stops spam before it reaches the blog, specifically the PHP focussed spambots. By reading their ’signatures’ and the use of blacklists, know spammers are prevented from accessing the comments section of your blog. This is an essential plugin, as aside from reducing spam from a few thousand a day down to dozens, it also prevents a massed spambot attack from taking your site offline.

More than one blogger that I’m aware of has been taken down by their host because a spambot attack was putting too great a strain on their shared server.

Simple Spam Filter: This is the clincher I feel for reducing spam on your blog, as it’s configurable by you, and is fully adaptive when spammers change their tactics. It comes with a list of simple spam words, which if it reads in the comment, will then challenge the commenter to prove they’re human by simply clicking a button to submit their comment. As a spambot won’t be able to confirm they’re human, the comment will get nuked.

The key here is that you can add to the list, either through just typing them in, or getting the filter to review your current spam folder, and then just selecting the words you want blacklisted. So, when the spammers had their recent bizarre attack of commenting ‘nice blog!’ or ‘Holy Tuesday!’ I just added the words ‘nice’ and ‘tuesday’ to my blacklist. This took the number of daily spam comments reaching Akismet down from 40+ to 4. Of course, after a while you can then remove words from the blacklist too.

You can get the original from the link above, or you can try the tweaked version from Stephen of More than Scratch The Surface.

Akismet: Yep, it comes with every installation of WordPress, but any spams getting through the first two will usually be caught here, so make sure it’s activated.

These three plugins took my daily spam moderation queue down from 400 to 3 or 4, most of which are human submitted rubbish. If I could wish anything for Christmas, it would be a painful death for all spammers…..

Any other complementary plugins  available that are worth trying?