How do I prevent comment spam from entering the database?

The CJD Spam Nuke plugin will allow you to view all spam in your database with one click and delete it all with another click. It’s not completely automatic, but since nobody else has answered this in a week, I’m guessing there is no completely automatic solution – so maybe this is a good-as-it-gets solution for you for now?

Use Akismet. It automatically deletes comments marked as spam after 15 days. (Immediate deletion is a bad idea as what if there’s a false positive?)

I actually find it much easier to glance through the spam with CJD Nuke Spam. I’m also finding that Akismet misses a lot of pretty obvious spam. It also only shows you 150 spam comments – if you have more than 150, there’s no way to view the rest to check for false positives. Hence, I’m looking for other options. I’ve turned on “users must be registered and logged in”, but even with that, I got spam waiting to be moderated this morning.

I personally use Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 with the Akismet plugin. SK2 keeps all the spam I get in the database, but it’s not a big deal to me as I usually never see it and it helps SK2 catch spam better.

Right now, installing Bad Behavior results in errors on every page of my blog, including the admin pages. I’m told this is something to do with the settings on my host – but when I’ve asked which settings those are, I’ve had no reply.

Well SK2 alone will work fine. I just use BB to stop spammers from spamming in the first place, but SK2 will catch them regardless.

I’m not concerned about spam getting published – so far, none has. I’d like to stop it from hitting my blog in the first place. I’m finding that I’m spending far more time dealing with spam than I want to; I’d really like to get BB working. I’ve tried changing the name of my comments file – had spam less than six hours later. I’ve tried auto-closing comments on post over 21 days old – I’m still getting spam on old posts (how??!!). Even setting my blog to comments from logged-in users only didn’t work – I *still* got comment spam from non-users. It’s not a case of them using future post IDs – there is no spam in the database for future posts. I am at a loss about what to do next.

The good old “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies.” makes my users unhappy, I received emails from two people used to write to my blog. I don’t know how to help them, and plus, they say that they see my email to ask for support! I didn’t put it there, oh, god! I enabled this option when I started to get spams, now, it’s rejecting my users. Plus, I cannot see their comments in my db, I was hoping that they were in as spams, but no chance, no comments from those users. It works very well, maybe too well.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks!

@arrariv – what plugins are we using? If SK2, it’s very configurable…

Sorry for my late reply. Bad Behavior plugin was blocking people even me, not spam scripts! Maybe it was a bug and they fixed it, I dunno. After shutting it down, everything worked perfectly. And regarding only few spams per day, we are better without it.
Thanks.
p.s. I’m gonna check SK2. I hope it’s better than Bad Behavior.