Our blog has run off WordPress for awhile now and for the most part we’ve been pretty free of comment and trackback spam. The Akismet plugin combined with some manual intervention on occasion has usually been all that was needed to keep our comments area relatively clean. Akismet has blocked 300,000 spam comments since we started using it.

The last few months, however, our spam problem has been getting progressively worse and we’re all spending more time than we want to manually deleting comments that make it through. We’ve installed two additional plugins to try to address the problem.

(1) Comment Timeout

In our case, most of the comment spam has been on posts buried deep in our archives. This plugin automatically closes comments on posts after 180 days of active commenting.

(2) Protect Web Form

We installed this plugin that makes users enter an annoying little code when posting a comment. This helps prevent the bots from automatically posting comments. I hate these things and we may take it off and hope the Comment Timeout works by itself.

Since making these changes, we haven’t gotten any spam comments at all. So mission accomplished. But in the process we’ve also ended the conversation on our older posts and made it a little harder for people to post comments.

Anybody else have any better ideas for how to deal with comment/trackback spam?