I installed it a few weeks ago, at someone’s suggestion. It is a complete failure, as far as I’m concerned. I have seen no diminution of spam from it. The only improvement is that I get more information about them in the email notification. Moveable Type used to have a feature that automatically blocked an IP address that posted more than X comments in less than Y time. This seem like a no brainer to me. Why can’t WordPress do it?
Or maybe it does, but I have to upgrade to the latest version? Anyone know?
I’ve actually noticed the increase in spam too, although to my horror I’ve discovered that spam companies are now hiring people in third world countries to spam comments since buying advanced software (that bypasses most anti-spam defenses) became too costly.
Typepad has an anti spam plugin for WordPress (Google typepad anti spam wordpress and scroll down to the page).
There are also plugins that you can install that can block people via IP, although most of them are also useless (as human spammers often put out fake IP address, or “borrow” ones from schools, governments and businesses).
Akismet works pretty good at pushing spam into the spam queue. I have the latest version of WordPress installed so all I have to do is click one button and the spam is gone. Anything that slips through goes into the moderation queue (I have all commenters’ first comments set to go into moderation) so I can delete it there. Still, it would be nice if I didn’t have to see the stuff at all. I’ve been experimenting with another blogging program called Bloo that does a much better job — so far my experimental blog hasn’t attracted any spam, and if it has they way they have their program setup is it gets rid of the spam before it gets into the database. I don’t know how they do it though and I probably wouldn’t understand if they explained it to me. Programming is hard. 😉
I use a CAPTCHA, but my blog is low traffic.
Have you tried http://Mollom.com
I’ve had pretty good luck with it. The few that seem to get through look to me like hand-crafted spam.
Akismet seems to work well enough. It’s better than it used to be.
“Moveable Type used to have a feature that automatically blocked an IP address that posted more than X comments in less than Y time. This seem like a no brainer to me. Why can’t WordPress do it?”
Because the people who manage WP development don’t understand the human dynamics of blog reading or administration? That’s the explanation I keep coming back to.
I use Akismet but also a plug-in called Bad Behavior – http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ on a couple of sites.
Based on their FAQ and documentation, It blocks spam-bots using the x, comments in y, time fashion and also uses some other blocking factors. It seems to work well for me. So well in fact I never check the logs to see what is blocked.
After reading your post I went to one of the sites and called up the log and found in the last week more than 100 spam-bot comments blocked with the IP addresses shown and I noticed no false positives. In my case Akismet catches what gets past Bad Behavior.
Orders of magnitude less traffic than you must get but it might be worth a look.
When I switched to a recent version of WordPress and Askimet, the spam comments stopped completely.