Just over a month ago, across my 3 blogs I was receiving around 500 spam comments a day to moderate. I had the latest versions of Akismet and Bad Behavior installed, and although none were reaching the blog, I still had over 500 comments to visually scan in the moderation queue, in order to remove those flagged as ‘false positives’. Bearing in mind that none of my blogs are exactly high traffic, this was still a very high number, and a real waste of my time.

Now, thanks mainly to a couple of tips from RT, I receive no more than 4 or 5 comments for moderation a day, and most of those are false positives. Spam checking only takes me a few minutes each day.

Here’s my anti-spam solution, in a rough order of how they stop spam hitting my blog.

1. Bad Behavior – Designed to stop spambots accessing php based websites (i.e. blogs), this plugin immediately reduces the amount of comments getting through and prevents server crashes if the bots go mad. One blogger I’m aware of got 6 blogs booted offline because the spambots crashed her shared server. Admittedly it was bad service on the part of her webhost, but BB would have stopped this.
2. http:BL Wordpress plugin – this plugin utilises  the Project Honeypot database, which is basically a blacklist of spammer IPs. If the comment matches a known spam IP, it gets nuked.
3. Simple Spam Filter -Any comments that have escaped the first two will now be run past this filter, which checks for excessive links (5), Bulletin Board style coded links, and a short-list of typical spam words. Anything that trips this filter will be given a chance to fix the comment, and/or enter a ‘Captcha’ style code. Bots who can’t do this will have the comments deleted. Humans are given clear instruction.
4. Akismet – Anything that escapes the above (usually just human generated spam) will then get snared by Akismet for moderation. As I said earlier, this is usually no more than 1-2 comments per blog.

So if you’re suffering from comment moderation overload, why not give the above combination a try? To date, no reader has told me that they have been blocked from leaving a comment, and if anything my recent comment level has increased, so it’s nice to spend more time answering them, than moderating spam!