Stopping Spam on Wordpress

My blog has been up since February 4th and I’ve already received 23 comments on my blog posts. Unfortunately 100% of the comments are spam! I activated the Akismet plugin for Wordpress by getting an API key from Akismet.com. However, this downside of the pluggin is that if a comment “looks” like spam but isn’t (a false positive) it will still get blocked. I found a pluggin that works in combination with Akismet called Conditional CAPTCHA for Wordpress. Basically, if the Akismet pluggin determines that the comment is spam, it will ask the commenter to complete a simple CAPTCHA. If they fail, then the comment will be automatically discarded or trashed. If they pass, it will be allowed into the spam queue. That way the spam queue will contain only the most likely false positives, making it much easier to identify them.

I’ve used CAPTCHA in the past to fight spam on my homebrew forum site www.TheBitterBrewer.com.  I noticed that bots attempting (and succeeding to) register users and subsequently post spam.  After installing CAPTCHA, the invalid user registrations stopped completely.