The amount of comment spam has been rising rapidly, even with efforts to reduce the tide. As a result, I weighed up the benefits of comments (again).
I still see the benefits in letting people comment on posts, so comments will stay, but I need a way of reducing the amount of comment spam. Playing around with Wordpress plug-ins, I’m going to try something different - a web service.
Akismet essentially outsources the problem to someone else. Free for personal use, signing up is a matter of getting a wordpress.com username, which supplies a key.
Some stats from their site, as of January 22, 2007:
601,615,558 spams caught so far
113,265 so far today
94% of all comments are spam
Given the recent comments I’ve seen, the 94% number is, if anything, low.