great post !

I don’t use anything but Akismet, which is fine for me … Very few spams get away with it, and I don’t really mind if a legit comment occasionnaly get flushed in the middle of 200 spams, mostly because I get so few comments on my blog that this makes it sort of unlikely to happen.

Makes me think that it might be because I have like 3 readers all in all :-D

Peter – I really like your CAPTCHA. It’s simple yet effective. The only improvement would be to put a textbox in the control panel section where you could type in your CAPTCHA words without the need to go to the code.

If I have few free moments I will see if I could hack this up. If I get it working I will send a patch your way.

Mark – for some reason CAPTCHA doesn’t seem to deter my readers. Go figure. Without bad behavior my Akismet would get few hundred posts in the queue each day. With bad behavior, but no CAPTCHA I get 30-40 per day.

With CAPTCHA, Bad Behavior and Akismet working together I get 0-5 spams in the Akismet queue per week.

I tried the capcha route and I found my comments dried up. I am using bad-behavior, as well as Akismet and it generally stops them cold, but I do need to manually delete the drek from the Akismet log, which gets a couple hundred a day.

Have you seen the pitch that the Xrumer people use for their spamming software? “Site owners set up comment categories to encourage you to post your links.” What rubbish!

Great post!

[…] How Do You Deal with Comment Spam? – from Terminally Incoherent […]

Thanks for the mention. I’d be interested to see how easy it is to adapt my CAPTCHA plugin for the other blogging engines, or whether a similar one already exists…