I’ve been spending a lot of time deleting comment and pingback spam from my two blogs (most of it from the moderation queue). My first impulse was to ban comments and pingbacks completely — after all, some blogs seem to do fine without them, and most people technically-oriented enough to read Quoderat already have their own blogs that they can use to comment on mine.
After some thought, however, I’ve decided on a compromise — I’m going to leave postings from the current and previous month open for comments, but close any older ones. That should eliminate a lot of the spam, but still allow discussion on recent postings. I might tighten that up a bit more, but I’ll give it a chance, first.
How is everyone else dealing with comment/pingback/traceback spam? My blog isn’t all that popular — it must be much worse for blogs with high rankings.
Quoderat 
It must be a consequence of the fact that I don’t use any “standard” blogging software, but I get almost no spam. Which is good because my tolerance threshold for
spam is pretty low these days.
I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 and use the SpamKarma plugin. That eats most of the spam I get without my even seeing it. I haven’t seen any false positives either.
If you can find a plugin to do it, make previewing a comment at least once before submission required. Comment spam bots will have a hard time getting past it.
With WP 1.5 I set it so that the first time any email address is used to post, it must undergo moderation. This has killed nearly all spam.
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