Because the engine running this blog is a home-modified version of the original release of James Husum’s Fuseblog and I’m chronically lazy chronically overworked I never bothered putting any comment moderation or spam filtering in. Deleting the odd spam comment was never too big a deal.
However, over the past few weeks it’s gotten a bit silly. 100-odd messages a day is not a big deal on some sites, but when they have to be manually deleted it’s kinda annoying.
I toyed with the idea of moving the domain to a Linux account and converting to WordPress, the most awesome blog engine ever, but then I’d have to write an import script AND a whole stack of redirects – refer to my earlier comment about laziness.
But then I found that an enterprising chap named Brandon Harper has written a CFC for WordPress’s comment spam API Askismet. CFAkismet took about 10 minutes to include in my comment processing script and it works great. No more pharmaceutical ads on this site!
I look after 5 WordPress blogs and Akismet keeps 99% of spam off all of them – and now it’s keeping kay lives here clean as well. It’s the most effective spam solution I’ve ever seen or heard of, short of turning off comments completely (that works too).