First thing: Thanks to you who commented to my test [now deleted]. I wanted to make sure I had not inadvertently gotten blocked the handful of people who might conceivably comment here. If you were blocked from posting a comment and you don’t know my email address, please email me here (provided email address good for one week, courtesy of Spambox).

Now for the recommendations….

But first, a little story.

Once upon a time (it was not actually a dark and stormy night, but it could have been), I moved from my “apartment” at LiveJournal to this, my “home” here at BlueHost, where I had them set up a WordPress blog for me. Once I was up and running — in virtually no time at all, actually — I posted a few things. All was well and good in my personal corner (niche?) of the blogosphere. But I began to worry anyway… because that’s what I do, m’kay.

Specifically, I began to worry about “comment spam“, also called “link spam”. Although I had not received any, I knew it was only a matter of time. So, I installed Akismet.

You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

WordPress made installing the Akismet filter easy as (memorizing the first four digits of) Ï€. And, in the course of time, it began to catch spam. At first there were just a few. Then, there were a few more, and a few more. And then, there were a lot more. At last count, Akismet has caught 1050 spam comments to this blog. Top hits: ringtones, viagra (and other assorted pharmaceuticals), gambling. Not that I wanted to know; but Akismet saves all the spam in a database for a period of days before automatically deleting them. I did not have a single false positive, and I trusted the filter. It started bothering me, though, that the spam comments were getting so close to me, infiltrating my precious allotted hard drive space, wasting my even more precious bandwidth. I didn’t want to see the spam anymore, jailed by Akismet or not. I wanted it stopped before it reached me at all.

Enter Bad Behavior:

[A] set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

There are a lot of plugins for WordPress, a number of them dedicated to stopping spam. Out of the many I looked at, Bad Behavior struck me as being particularly effective. So, I installed it. Quickly and easily, too, using Fetch. Once I fired up the plugin, I didn’t have too long to wait. Within an hour Bad Behavior had caught ~20 “spambots” (see the Web Robots FAQ for more info) trying to accomplish their nefarious ends. Since yesterday, it has caught 77 spambots. And nothing has gotten through even to Akismet. Needless to say, I am quite pleased with Bad Behavior and hope someday to donate some currency to its creator, Michael Hampton (who also happens to run a recommended site, Homeland Stupidity).