After trying a number of things to combat spam, a little over 3 months ago I installed Akismet, a free-for-non-commercial-use anti-spam service from Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Of course, I don't use WordPress for this site; I use Drupal. No worries. The Automattic folks allow anyone to code to the API, and Markus Petrux of phpMiX.org has written a Drupal Akismet module.

As you can see from the counter in the lower right, in just over 3 months, Akismet has caught 100 spam comments. That seems to be a pretty good indicator that my site is not popular enough to be hit. I do run the Bad Behavior module, as well, which catches lots of comment spam before it gets to Akismet, rejecting it for petty little things like bad headers and stuff. My Akismet numbers might be higher, but I like that Referer spam is blocked by Bad Behavior.

Before Bad Behavior, the spam was much worse. But even with it, it was pretty bad. I used the old Spam module for Drupal, but it had pretty poor results. Then I shifted to captcha, but spammers got by it even when legit people couldn't.

Akismet has been wonderful. Nothing's slipped past, and nothing's been falsely accused of being spam. That's pretty good.

Hey. I know we kinda had an abusive relationship. But... if you happen to see Captcha hanging around somewhere... tell her I miss her, Ok? Yeah yeah yeah, I know... I just hope she's, you know, doin' ok. I'm better off without her, it's true, but still... just tell her I think about her sometimes is all.