The Akismet WordPress anti-spam plugin has changed it’s policy to not run on sites that have adverts which includes mine. Without it I get an average of about 1 spam comment per hour and the interface for removing spam takes more mouse actions than desired. For email spam it’s about the same volume half of which is messages with SpamAssassin scores high enough to go into the MaybeSpam folder (that I go through every few weeks) and half of which goes straight to my inbox. But fortunately moving spam to a folder where I can later use it to train Bayesian classification is a much faster option on PC and is also something I can do from my phone MUA.
As an experiment I have configured my blog to only take comments from registered users. It will be interesting to see how many spammers make it through that and to also see feedback from genuine people. People who can’t comment can tell me about it via the contact methods listed here [1].
I previously wrote about other ways of dealing with hostile comments [2]. Blogging seems to be less popular nowadays so a Planet specific forum doesn’t seem a viable option. It’s a pity, I think that YouTube and Facebook have taken over from blogs and that’s not a good thing.
I do run a few blogs on wordpress. I had a similar problem, but because I never liked akismet as an end-of-pipe solution and too many false-positives. Spam was flooding in constantly. I turned to registered users only, but then the spammers were flooding the registration process. My akismet-free solution: I slightly changed the URL of the registration process from default to another which you need to type in by hand (only a small modification in the wordpress code). I explained everything in my charta, which everyone is supposed to read before commenting anyway. Since then: absolute silence by spammers. Of course it’s a bit easier for me as my blogs are in German, which is not the lingua franca of the internet.
Without registration you can do something similar with the blacklist function turning it also into a whitelist function. Or maybe changing the reply function that with the default URL there is none and only when you modify the URL by hand with a keyword you can comment (not tested so far).
I tested other spam prevention methods. Obfuscation of public e-mail addresses by replacing the letters with their random selected HTML-entities (decimal, hex, variing numbers of leading zeros; very simple php-script) was very successful. Registration in a forum with a test question in leetspeak (advantage German) so you cannot google the answer, too.
I think you need to take advantage of the weaknesses of spammers: they are lazy. They always go for the easy catch. If they weren’t lazy, they would not be spammers.