Blog Azeroth

For those who don't get the reference, see BigBearButt's post on kneecapping the gold spammer.

One of the downsides to using WordPress is that it seems much easier for spammers -- of gold and "other" services -- to target our sites for mass SPAM attempts. Fortunately, WordPress has a number of great tools and addons to help you protect your blog and your readers from this nonsense. I run all of the following plugins, and they work well together. So far, I've had a total of 2 SPAM messages get through and a total of 2600+ prevented:

• Akismet
  Akismet determines whether a given comment is SPAM based on patterns and parameters the service has refined over time. This service generally comes with any WordPress installation, though you may need to enable it and supply your WordPress API key (a long, multi-character code given to you when you sign up for an account through WordPress.com) to activate it.
• Bad Behavior
  Bad Behavior recognizes some spambots by their IP addresses and will attempt to block their use of your site.
• Spam Karma 2
  Spam Karma 2 recognizes certain "flags" on comments entered on your site that might indicate the message is being generated by a spam bot. One example is a comment that was entered less than 5 seconds after pageload.

Thanks for the tips! Jon and I have been having this issue lately, so we'll definitely check into these.