Almost since I started blogging here, I’ve been getting an awful lot of spam comments, which of course really annoys me. So, for not long time ago, I decided that I had to do something about it, and I found two great solutions. Both exist as plugins for WordPress, which is what I’m currently using here.

The first one was Google’s reCAPTCHA, which I’m sure you know or have seen before. It basically asks you to type in some letters on a picture, before you can continue with something, in my case, submitting a comment.
The second I found was Akismet, which is a spam filtering service. Whenever someone comments a post here, Akismet will check to see if it’s a spam comment or not. It’s actually included in WordPress from the start, but you’ll need a key on their website to activate it. I think WordPress.com users get one automatically.

So, what did I choose? I decided to go with Akismet because I think reCAPTCHA annoys the user a bit too much, when they just want to say something. Until now, it’s been working great. It has protected me from 73 spam comments, and all of them actually were spam! So of course I will continue to use this from now, and keep an eye on all comments to see if it actually makes an error in the future.

I highly recommend you to try Akismet out if you’re having spam problems. Keep in mind, that I never tried reCAPTCHA out.