How to stop spam on Wordpress?

As you can see if you click on my photography site in my signature I have like one comment. This either means I get no views or people are turned off because they have to register to comment. If I don't get people to register I get a ton of spam emailed every day. Is there a good way to allow comments without being registered that also stops a good portion of spam at the same time? Anyhow, anyone has any good ideas for comment on Wordpress that allow more freedom for comments without making the user register...I'm all ears

1. Always keep wordpress up to date.. prevents someone from exploiting a hack
2. Keep your plugins up to date for the same reason
3. Enable akismet, it's free if your site is not commercial.. you just need to get an API key.. it's great at blocking comment spam
4. There are tons of great plugins that are free.. httbl is one that I use a lot.. I usually just search for "security" or "spam"
5. Enable captcha, it's not flawless but it keeps out a lot of the botspam

I do a TON of work with wordpress and joomla.. that's just some basic suggestions

IMPORTANT: Back up your site files and database prior to upgrading, not every upgrade goes smooth... and test things after.. especially important if things have gotten too far out of date.

As for them monitoring? a lot of malicious web spiders monitor the net for blogging style sites so they can spam comments, or even try to do script kiddie hacks.. WordPress is a prime target for that kind of thing because it's such a popular platform.. the thing that really sucks is if someone does exploit a bug because WordPress or a plugin is out of date it can often be a pain to clean up .. so keeping regular backups is really an important thing.. and keeping up to date =)

I work for a company that does a lot of WordPress and Joomla installs.. I'm also a linux systems administrator who has written tons of monitoring systems SIMPLY because I know how often people target those platforms... unfortunately my stuff is server level monitoring so it would do you no good.. but I do have systems in place that monitor for too many posts to one URL in a short period of time to prevent brute force attacks to try to get into your admin area as an example... the point being... it's not uncommon... and I doubt it will ever be uncommon.

Thanks...Installed Captcha and updated askimet. The word press stuff is always kept up to date

originally posted by: minkmouse
Thanks...Installed Captcha and updated askimet. The word press stuff is always kept up to date

That should help... if not, httpbl is a good one.. you have to register for an api key for that one too if I remember correctly...

I also was looking around and found this one.. I have no connection with them, but it appears to be free and has great ratings.. if you have more trouble it might be worth a look

wordpress.org...

GOOD LUCK

a reply to: minkmouse

Miniatus has already given you some great advice, but it sounds like you could benefit from installing Google analytics as well. It gives you lots of very useful information about your visitors to help you better market your site. Here is a good tutorial on how to set it up if you're interested.

Beautiful work btw.

a reply to: Bone75

Thanks, both for the compliment and the link

I make $ 70.000 a week working from home 1 hour a day and you could too spam: why do they not tell you it is drug dealing in the ad