Blog spam is one of the banes of any blogger. It’s just such a pain when you think you’ve gotten a comment only to find… junk. But most of it is amazingly easy to stop.

The first thing I always do on a new blog is turn on Akismet and add my Wordpress API key. This stops the huge majority, and doesn’t catch too many false positives. I did, during this past week, have an unusual number of spams get past Akismet, across all my blogs, but for the most part I rarely have to deal directly with spam comments. And considering that on the worst day Akismet caught several hundred spams for me while I had to deal with perhaps 6 on my busiest blog, I can’t really complain.

Alternatively, you can use Spam Karma. I haven’t tried it personally, but it’s reputation is excellent.

Some people like to install a captcha. I’m not overly fond of this solution so long as Akismet is working well. It can discourage legitimate users from commenting. But if you like this idea, there are plenty of scripts out there to help.

Some people require registration to post comments. I don’t, and I won’t register in order to comment. I have had spammers register on my blogs to see what they can see, but I don’t give basic users anything interesting to work with. This can really discourage people from commenting, and I really do not recommend it.

I also just flat out have some words blacklisted. The usual list includes various drug names, adult terms and casino terms. Of course, if I had a blog where I was likely to refer to any of these legitimately, I would consider adapting my standard list.

Wordpress also allows you to put a comment into moderation queue for having however many links. Most legitimate comments won’t have a lot of links, so set this number nice and low.

I love using comment moderation. At the very least you should always moderate a user’s first comment. You can moderate all the time if you prefer. But this allows me to consider if the “good job” comments are really nothing more than a quick link attempt.

I also receive email every time there is a comment on one of my blogs. This makes it easy to see what is being said even by people whose comments are not subject to moderation. Just in case.

There is definitely a balance between protecting your blog from spam and making it hard for people to comment. You have to decide what that line is for you. Once you have that decided, you can start working on encouraging people to comment on your blog.

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