Blog Discussions

How do you avoid spam?

Here are some ways you can avoid spam on your site.  Which do you use?  How effective are they?

1. Use a contact form.  Don't make your email address public.  Especially not as a clickable link.
   
2. Use a different email for each site you sign up for. e.g. BlogCatalog, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Entrecard - then if one email account starts getting spammed, you only have to change it in one place.  This is more to do with email spam than website spam, though.
   
3. Moderating comments.  This means that every comment on your site will be held until you approve it.  Handy for stopping spam ever appearing on your site, but it requires a lot of manual effort, and is not really an option for sites that get hundreds of comments every day.  However, if you can add users to an "approved" list so you only have to approve their first comment, this seems like a very sensible solution to the spam problem.  Well, unless you're a big site that attracts lots of new users every day and many of them only write a small number of comments.
   
4. Anti-spam plugins.  Akismet is a WordPress plugin that analyses comments as they come in and attempts to flag the ones that look like spam.  From what I've heard, it works well, but no system is perfect - so you do get false positives sometimes (i.e. legitimate comments being flagged as spam).  You do have to check to see if the right comments are being let through and that the bad ones are being flagged.  I haven't used it myself though, so please correct me if I'm wrong!
5. CAPTCHA.  An image of distorted letters and numbers and you have to type those characters into a box.  Get it wrong and you have to try again.  I think these are quite effective so long as they are easy to read - I've seen some CAPTCHA images that are really terrible!  This is a method I currently use on my site.  However, a few people have had problems with it, and some people refuse to comment on sites that use it.  I know we can't please everyone, but there's no ideal method for blocking spam.  I'd like to try moderation in future to see if that helps anyone out.
   
6. Requiring registration.  This is likely to limit your comments drastically, and is still not a guaranteed way to stop spam.  It's a good method for blogging networks, mainly because you can then let people submit their site and edit the site details without allowing anyone to edit it.  Perhaps a bit too draconian for most blogs.
   
7. Closing comments after a specified period of time.  This method works on the assumption that a few months down the line, nobody will want to add anything new to your post.  Spammers seem to enjoy targeting posts that have long since disappeared from the front page of a site, hoping that the site owner won't notice the spam.  I've had some great comments weeks or even months after I originally published a blog entry, so this method doesn't seem logical to me.
8. Turning off comments altogether.  No comments, no spam, right?!  OK, you might not get any comment spam this way, but don't cut off your readers!  This method is a bit extreme - does anyone use it?

Let me know your thoughts...
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