In August, 2010, I described a simple method for dramatically reducing the number of spam comments that are submitted to a WordPress blog. The spam comments are rejected before they are checked by Akismet, so they never make it into the database at all.

Now, a few months later, I’m posting a screenshot of the Akismet stats graph from the WordPress dashboard showing the number of spam comments identified by Akismet before and after the system was implemented.

Akismet stats for August - December, 2010

The spike in spam comments detected around November 3rd occurred after an update to WordPress overwrote my altered wp-comments.php file. I replaced the file and the spam dropped back down to single digits per day.