I’ve seen a steep increase in comment spam in the past couple weeks — from basically none to ten or more a day. Across three blogs, this gets pretty annoying, even if they don’t make it through the filter — I still have to delete them and I get emailed about them as they’re submitted.
I had in place a WordPress plugin called Anti Spam Image, which was a rudimentary Captcha-style “verify you are a human” image test. They must have gotten around it, because that wasn’t stopping anyone.
So yesterday I looked into Akismet, which requires a free, basic WordPress.com account. In less than twenty four hours, I’ve had no false positives and here are the stats:
this blog: 1 spam caught
wedding blog: 15 spam caught!
Code Sorcery Workshop: 28 spam caught!!
That’s pretty sweet. So far, I heartily recommend it.