I recently updated my WordPress install to 2.whatever which allowed me to set up the built-in Akismet plug-in to control commnet spam. To get it running, all I had to do was sign up for a WordPress.com account, copy the Akismet key that WordPress.com gives you and plug that into WordPress.
So far so good. Only a couple of comment spams have made it into my moderation queue, which makes comments much more manageable.
Captchas are used throughout the web to try and determine humans from machines. In other words applying a Turing test. Newly added to the Zoinger comment template, here’s a screenshot to show ya what it’s all about.
Adding the Captcha for WordPress was easy. Just snag AuthImage — a WordPress plugin — and modify a couple of templates per the README.TXT file. Simple.
I figured that this was the most elegant way to try and block comment spam. Other solutions for WordPress use filters and/or white/blacklists that can give false positives (as well as false negatives) — and I think you have to tune them sometimes. Although I haven’t received any spam yet on this blog, I was getting some on the old MovableType blog. An ounce of prevention…
Oh, the original README.TXT install instructions were… terrible. I updated a version of them specific to WordPress v1.5 which you can find here.