Remaining spam-free with WordPress

A few months ago I posted that I had almost hit 80,000 spam comments on this blog. As you can imagine, I like reading about Viagra, diet pills and nude celebrities as much as the next man. And seeing the number was climbing at a rate of a few hundred a day, I looked for a better solution.
Enter Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior (shouldn’t that be Behaviour) is an anti-spam plugin that looks at the requests your website gets and block spam bots from even seeing your site. It’s actually pretty clever and quite comprehensive. For example, if a request hits your website that claims it’s GoogleBot (Google’s way of indexing your website), the plugin checks the IP that the request is coming from, and if it’s not coming from Google, it blocks it. And so on and so forth, it checks every request to make sure it’s legitimate. Once I installed it, spam dropped to a couple a day and it’s been holding there ever since.
So, my final word on spam on WordPress: A combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior is the best solution I’ve used so far!