Hey there,
I have comment moderation turned on until I’m comfortable with my Spam-catching plugins. Unfortunately, I’ll be away from the computer for the next little while and won’t be around to approve comments. I’m sorry if this causes you a hassle in any way, shape, or form… Just one of the speedbumps on moving to a new system.
Best,
– Christopher
Akismet is all you need. It’s saved me so much time in the three weeks I’ve had it on my WordPress blog, and it’s caught 15000 spam comments without killing any “real” comments (that I know of).
Your…your theme is off! The beautiful theme that I lust after so much is gone! Why?
(And I *still* want to hire your designer…)
I´m with Augie there, Akismet is a godsent when dealing with spam. Also, if you need something a bit more… hardcore, you´d might want to look into SpamKarma2 (and, no, I´m not gonna pimp my WordPress Plugins you absolutely need post again).
Problem with Akismet is, even though Spam does not get through, it is still processed. Even if it catches 3000 spams a day, it´ll still hit your server, as those spams are processed through the comments.php script and they are written to your database, resulting in a huge serverload, which you never even notice until your webhost suggest you upgrade your hosting plan.
There is a high-maintainance way to avoid this, described here.
Another possible solution would be the Bad Behaviour plugin, which filters comments for spam, before any database queries are started, but it has been reported filtering legitemate comments on occasion.