1. Install Akismet – This has to be one of the best plugins. The downside is they’d like you pay if you get a ton of spam. After all, it is the nice thing to do. For the average user though, it’s free.
2. Install Spam Karma – Excellent plugin that can stop a flood of spam comments. It works great and it’s completely free.
3. Install a captcha. It can be as easy as 2+2=? or it could be one of those letter puzzles. Personally I prefer the math ones as long as it’s not something like “What’s 28×5″. Keep it simple as I think 2+8 works just as good.
4. Have some fields required. Make sure that you are requiring Name and Email for any comments. I don’t think it helps much, but it’s better than leaving it wide open.
5. Use the Blacklist – Some words just don’t belong in blog comments. If you think of some ‘adult’ terms you’d like to keep out, just add them to the blacklist. The comments will be immediately deleted. Be careful though, you can’t recover deleted comments.
6. Moderate More – Use WordPress’ moderation area to put more spam into moderation instead of just letting it go live and cleaning it up later. Things like changing the number of links in comments to 1 or 0 can help a lot. Also adding /strong works well as a lot of recent spam contains a few bolded keywords. Analyze your spam to see if you can find a trend.
7. Install Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which is suppose to analyze the bots coming in and block the spam ones. I haven’t tried it, but love the idea.
8. Login to Comment – Not my favorite method as I think that if you require a login, you also loose a lot of good comments because people won’t take the time.
9. Login to OpenID to Comment – OpenID is one of the mass ID sites on the internet. One account with them will work across many websites. This is a better option than #8, but I’m still not a “login to comment” fan.
10. Turn Off Comments – If you don’t have them, you won’t get spam. Then again, you also won’t get any good comments and that’s a big part of blogging.

In the end, zero spam comments is not likely. No one can stop a real person from putting in a link to their porn site. But you can help slow down the automated spam quite easily.

What plugins or tips do you have to share?

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Their names have been hijacked by blog spammers, according to Akismet which stops spam appearing on my blog.

A tidal wave of comment spam this weekend has been stopped in its tracks by Akismet. Apart from one little recent glitch, Akismet really is an excellent service which learns from the collective feedback of everyone who uses it.

Then there’s trackback spam. Again, loads of it this weekend, mostly from one particular site trying to connect to my post the other day about Microsoft’s RSS feeds directory.

What was interesting about this trackback spam salvo is how Akismet dealt with it. The first three trackbacks were waiting in my comment moderation queue, so not initially seen as spam. A quick look at the site left me in no doubt that this was clearly a splog so I marked them all as spam. That action sent my choices to Akismet to add this info to their database. From that point on, all other trackback requests (more than 20 so far) have been stopped automatically by Akismet.

Originally developed for WordPress, Akismet is also available as a plugin for blogs running Movable Type and on some other platforms. To use it, you need an API key which you can get only by starting a blog on the hosted WordPress.com service (now that’s a smart move).

One nifty plugin I have installed is Akismet Spam Count which lets any visitor here know how many spams Akismet has stopped. No other use, really! It’s in the sidebar on the right under the heading “The War Against Spam.”

Over 1,340 spams stopped dead so far since I started this blog at the end of February. Small beer, though, compared to the second most spammed person in the world with over 270,000 trapped spams.

That certainly puts a lot into perspective.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Take a look at BuzzKutzz.com (no link for you) and gasp at the long list of blogs they have listed in the right-hand menu. Then take a look at each post, looks like they’re mostly stealing other’s content.

Ryan Bowman, we thank you for adding so quality content to the web.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.