Blog Comment Spam – Again

I was chatting with a blogger earlier today who was having issues with comment spam.
I guess anyone who runs a blog for a while will run into the issue of comment spam and unfortunately there is no perfect solution unless you resort to using captcha on your comments.
So what does work?

Bad Behavior (sic) is pretty effective at stopping the junk before it hits your comment moderation list. The only downside is that some UserAgents that aren’t actually evil may get stopped. This happened to me recently when I was playing with AlertSite’s services. The simplest solution in that instance was to completely disable the plugin while I was testing the service.
Akismet comes with WordPress, but is also available for a lot of other software these days (including Gossamer Threads’ Glinks!). It’s pretty good, though you do need to check the spam queue from time to time, as I keep finding legitimate comments being marked as spam. Why does this happen? I’ve no idea and I haven’t had the energy or the inclination to find out.
Other tricks people have tried include using .htaccess to deny access to their blogs, but in a lot of cases they are simply duplicating the work of Bad Behavior.
What would be better would be to combine one of the antispam tools available with iptables, so you could completely block the HTTP request before it hit apache and thus take the load off the server completely. Of course that would be impossible on a shared server.. but why would that bother me? 🙂