Success Tackling Comment Spam
Two weeks ago I was complaining about the default Akismet Spam Protection that comes installed with WordPress. It has always been a bit of a pain having to trawl through the spam trap once a week to pick out the odd legitimate comment, so I stopped doing it. After a brief blogging holiday I came back and found a few nice comments rotting away under Spam. I posted a bit of an apology and a complaint and then Keiron suggested I try WP-SpamFree, a WordPress plugin that he was testing.
It takes a more pro-active approach to spam protection. Rather than act as a simple filter that places spam in the Spam Trap. It completely blocks spam posters and particularly bots from leaving posts. It is really effective at this and means there is no spam to search through at all. Great if you get lots of incoming spam or are just a bit lazy like I am 
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Well I’ve tried it out for two weeks, and I can now give it a hearty recommendation. It has managed to block those dodgy russian comments (Anyone else get these?), spam links, and all the other nasty stuff I was getting, and as far as I can tell there are no false positives. My traffic has increased a bit over the last couple of weeks and this plugin has saved me a bit of work, and a lot of headaches, as spam attempts have gone through the roof. So if you hate having to manage spam comments as much as I do, give it a go.
July 24, 2009 7:30 pm 
Glad to hear it’s working for you – I’ve been very happy with it!
Keiron´s last blog ..Facebook sez, “Don’t mind us, we’re just whoring out your photos”
It’s certainly good. So good, I’ve just turned off holding comments from new people for authorisation!