One of the other features I forgot to mention that is returning with the new site is real time comments. I had turned on comment moderation when the comment spammers started bombarding my site. In the last couple of weeks, even that has gotten out of hand, with spammers requiring me to clean out over 100 comments a day.

So I started doing some research and found a couple of great plugins called Kitten’s Spam Words and Kitten’s Spaminator both written oddly enough by Kitten of mookitty.co.uk. SpamWords makes it much easier to train WordPress 1.2+ to block spam messages by allowing you to “mark messages as spam” which adds their email address, IP Address and URL to the blocked word list. The Spaminator combines two spam blocking/retribution concepts (Tar Pit and Three Strikes) to help block spam from even getting into your system and to punish those who try. With the use of these products, I have effectively cut down my total incoming comment spam to 5 moderated messages. None got through the screen to the actual site! Not to mention, by using the SpamWords plugin I will continue to improve the effectiveness of the Spaminator by providing it a better word list to select strikes from.

So if your blogging via WordPress and dealing with the plague that is comment spam, check these two products out. They are the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in this war in quite some time.