Some of you might have noticed that this blog doesn’t have many comments, and none of them are spam.

This is not by accident. But I don’t manually remove spam.

I started by activating the akismet anti-spam plugin that came with my copy of wordpress. It was great for a few months, but since it occasionally marked legitimate comments as spam, I needed to manually check the akismet logs for the rare legit comment.

It recently got to the point where akismet was blocking 100 spam comments per day! A bit much for me to check manually.

I then started looking at manually excluding bad IP addresses via the .htaccess file, but it was too much work to maintain.

I recently found a post in a forum somewhere (I lost the link), where someone said using akismet together with “bad behaviour” worked wonders.

So after some reading/research, I installed bad behaviour.

I must say: bad behaviour, in combination with akismet is just fantastic!

Anybody who is sick of checking through a huge aksimet spam log, will find this combination of wordpress plugins will work very well.

Bad behaviour also has a whitelist, just in case it blocks legitimate comments. But since it blocks comments based on the form of the HTTP requests, someone would have to go out of their way to post a comment, and make it appear to originate from a comment robot.

In the month since installing bad behaviour, I’m finding that akismet is blocking less than 10 spam comments per day, and bad behaviour started off blocking about 800 comments per day, but its now down to just under 700… With a bit of luck, the spammers might start leaving my blog alone…