I’ve been being hit with comment spam on my blog for a bit. At first it was just one or two comments a week and I’d go in and nuke them from the database. Then it got to be 15 at one time from a dozen IPs. At this point I turned on moderation for all comments. This wasn’t great, but it was workable since I don’t get all that many comments, spam or otherwise. However, it got unmanageable yesterday when the I had about 60 comment spam posts to moderate. This morning I decided to look into what else I could do about it.

Browsing the WordPress site I found the following wiki article: How to combat comment spam with WordPress. It talks about the stuff that is built into wordpress, which is what I had been using. It then talked about renaming certain files to get around the bots, which seems like an unmaintainable idea in the long run.

Finally, at the bottom of the page was a link to something I thought was workable. Gudlyf has posted a plugin he wrote for WordPress called AuthImage. It does a simple captcha test as a reader posts their comments. I figure I’d give this one a try. It puts a slightly added burden on the random comment poster, but it allows me to turn off moderation and still avoid getting the spam messages.