Combatting Blog Spam

Blog spam is a huge problem. Akismet estimates that 93% of comments made on blogs are usually spam. That is a ridiculously high amount of spam! A little blog like mine doesn’t receive a lot of traffic (maybe 20-30 visitors a day). Yet, since my conversion to WordPress several months ago, I have received well over 600 spam comments (versus about 50 legit comments). It wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I realized that maybe I should check on which posts are being affected. Know what I discovered? They were posts about WordPress.

I love the Akismet plugin for WordPress. It works well, and I have yet to deal with a spam comment on the front-end of my site. It’s caught every bit of spam I’ve ever received through this site and makes dealing with it very easy.
So, what did I do to take care of the spam – so even Akismet wouldn’t have to deal with it? That was easy, actually. I disallowed Pings and Comments on the posts attracting the spammers. Problem solved (for now at least).