One of the biggest benefits of upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 has been the new version of the Akismet plugin. All the other tweaks are all very nice, but the automatic deletion of spam on posts over a month old has left my spam queue almost empty. Considering I was receiving more that 100 spam comments a day previous to that (sadly double my unique daily visitors and nothing compared to some blogs), this has been a miracle. To date, Akismet has stopped 11,670 spam comments and I couldn't be happier that I no longer have to look at 99% of them.

I can't give all the credit to the new Akismet though. I recently installed Bad Behaviour to try to stop spammers even reaching the blog. It is currently displaying that it has blocked 735 access attempts in the last 7 days, so it must be helping too.

Comment spam is the bane of blogging and the existence of fantastic plugins like Akismet, Bad Behaviour and, not forgetting, Spam Karma (which I haven't used, but is spoken of in the same breath as the other two) makes thousands of lives easier. I can't imagine what I would have done, had I been made to moderate or delete each and every one of those 11,000 comments! Maybe one day the spammers will give up, until then we have the above to thank. Plugin authors are amazing, but the ones who save this much trouble need extra thanks, maybe one day I'll even drop a donation in a Paypal account. Yeah, I will, I think they'll appreciate that.