One of the reasons WordPress became my favorite CMS nearly 10 years ago was Akismet. Back then Akismet eliminated spam like no other plugin. But times have changed:
10 minutes after deleting 2300 spam comments and 156 pending comments on my thePhotoFinishes.com website, Akismet had let in 90 new pending comments of which only 2 could be approved. Akismet does not seem to be up to its job against the spambots that have reasonable looking comments and only 1 or 2 links. These comments easily slip through and can total 1000’s in less than a week. So for the past 3 months I have been looking for alternatives.
WordPress Zero Spam
At WordCamp Toronto a discussion about spam included reference to WordPress Zero Spam as being a plugin that delivered on its name. So in December I installed Zero Spam on this site. Here are the results:
Literally zero spam and the usual trickle of occasional praise getting through. And its obvious that Zero Spam is doing a lot work if you look at its logs:
Note the shift in the attack mode. Hackers are dropping Spam and moving to breaking into the website through false registrations. So I am taking more defensive measures but the first line of defense is now Zero Spam replacing Akismet on all my websites. So it is RIP Akismet for this WP developer.
I have heard of this plugin and basically only good things just like you said. I am currently using Spamshield and growmap for my website and never had any spam not even one. I might try this plugin just for a test to see if anything changes. But since I never get any spam now and they say curiosity killed the cat, I hesitate. Perhaps this ia what got the cat killed :)
Claudiu –
If you have Cats Meow current spam protection I say stick with it. After all, it was the huge misses by Akismet that drove me to drink from some other plugins.
Jack