I’m starting to get a little comment spam here and there. I knew it was going to happen soon. The first step that I took was to introduce captchas for comments, but I knew that this solution was not very robust (i.e., the vocabulary in my captcha plugin is very simple — yeah, I have to improve that — and spammers can get around the captchas by trackback spamming and through my mobile interface which doesn’t support captchas yet).

A more robust blog-spam solution can be found here if you are running WordPress 1.5. I’m going to have to take some time in the near future to implement some or all of these solutions.

If you are new to blogging, an alternative to running your own blogging software is to use a service like TypePad. TypePad is a paid-for service, but offers lots of customization potential. If you don’t need to customize your blog that much, there are lots of free services like Blogger, Yahoo! 360, MSN Spaces, etc. It seems logical that a service should be able to do a much better job of combating spam than an individual.