I’ve been happy with Akismet, the spam filtering plugin from Automattic. It has caught over 250,000 spam comments with minimal effort on my part. A handful of spam comments get through each week that I have to manually mark as spam, but that’s far better than the hundreds I used to deal with.

I’ve often wondered how many valid comments were getting marked as spam. Initially I would look over every spammed comment to make sure I caught the valid ones, but that became too onerous. Now I use the same method I use for the gmail – whatever goes in the spam folder stays in the spam folder. The only time I break that rule is when I have good reason to think a valid email (or comment) was flagged as spam. Thankfully, it’s not a frequent occurrence.

Techcrunch tested out TypePad Antispam, the new spam filter from SixApart and didn’t have as many false positives as they got with Akismet. Based on their positive experience, I’m trying it out as well to see how it compares.

Installation was a breeze. The plugin behaves just like Aksimet, down to needing an API key from Typepad. I’ll keep an eye on comment spam for a few weeks to see if it works better than Akismet.

(via techrunch)

Update: After a few days of testing, I found that while I haven’t seen any valid comments marked as spam, I’ve had several spam comments not marked as spam, which is a nuisance. After marking at least a dozen comments as spam I’ve switched back to Akismet. It usually misses 2-3 spam comments a week, if that.