Blog Azeroth

I have it set now where I at least have to approve comments from people who haven't had one approved before, but I'm wondering if there's an easier, more automatic way of dispensing with these insurance and other spam comments I'm constantly getting. I'm using WordPress 2.5, self hosted.

Combine Akismet with WP-Spamfree, and you'll be pretty much set. Haven't had anything to moderate manually since I added Spamfree a week ago.

I believe WordPress's default is to moderate the first comment from a poster. Combined with Akismet and Bad Behavior, I've never had a live spam comment on my site.

The nice thing about this combination is there is zero impact on the commenter (except their first comment doesn't appear automatically); in other words, they don't have annoying captchas or other spam-detectors to wade through. They simply post and move on.

My blog just uses Akismet, though I did take the time to go through and configure it each step of the way. I check the spam comments once in a while to make sure it didn't have a false positive, and check every comment made on my blog. So far, only a single spam post has made its way to the live site, and a quick addition to the Akismet rules ensured the strategy they used would never happen again.

Oh, and while I don't make it so I have to check everyone's first post to make sure it's non-spam, if a user posts one non-spam message, the rest of their messages (based on IP, username, and email address) will bypass the spam filter and automatically been trusted.

Again, haven't had any issues at all with just using Akismet.

(Oh, and I use a simple CAPTCHA on my contact page and an image for my GMail address and haven't had any spam from that yet)

~Salad

For what it's worth I am still using Akismet with the default settings on wordpress.com It seems to catch all the spam so far.

What should I be on the lookout for in terms of spam in the future?

Akismet by itself is often good enough. After traffic gets above a certain point you will start to see a few slip through which is when people start using the others like Bad Behavior which Kestrel mentioned.

I'm not sure why, but one of my web hosts recommended strongly against using the Bad Behavior addon. They said it could be responsible for a slowdown in my site's response time. >.< Not sure if there's any truth to that. I use Akismet and Spam Karma right now.

Phae, an earlier version of Bad Behavior was...well, badly behaved. It created a separate database, I believe, that didn't play well with WordPress in general. That has since been rectified; I've had zero issues with it since they updated it after the WP 2.5 release.