I’ve started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can’t say as I’ve been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.
So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I’d guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I’ve received since activating it today. I’m hoping it gets better.
It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you’re running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.
So if there’s any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That’s where the moderation comes in; I’ll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.
Been running Akismet along with Spamlookup on my MT install, and the combination of both catches about 95% of my spam and sends it straight to my junk folder (and that’s about 1500 a day). Another 3 or 4 percent get moderated and put in my regular folder in moderated status, other couple percent make it through. But Akismet is a handy little tool, even if there are privacy issues with it (as it sends all the comment data to the Akismet servers — including email address, etc…).