Early yesterday, I installed the http:BL plugin and noticed that a lot of harvesters were being blocked. My comment spam also decreased. It continued to decrease through this morning.

After doing some theme tweaks this morning, I started to check through some things and noticed the APAD: Simple Spam Filter on the WordPress dashboard. Curious as always, I visited the plugin site for Simple Spam Filter for WordPress, read everything, downloaded it and installed it. Then I waited for more spam to show up that wasn't caught by either plugin.

After adding a few spam words to the second plugin based on what I was receiving, I waited. Then I waited some more. This evening, I went back and looked and seen a few blocks from the first plugin. Then I looked at the results in the second plugin. It showed me that 36 comment spams had been blocked and there was nothing waiting to be checked in the Akismet tab.

Now this is what I call results. No spam and nothing to check. The legitimate comments came through today without a hitch and as far as I know, no legitimate visitors or comments are being blocked. I won't know that until someone complains via email.

On another note, I told someone a while back that I thought my Alexa ranking was skewed for various reasons, one of them being the spammers. Then I realized, while spammers may affect my traffic numbers via the analytic programs, I seriously doubt they're using an Alexa toolbar! I think the analytic programs do a good job filtering out most of the spambots as well as the legitimate search robots. My ranking may not be skewed at all, but it continues to improve every 3 to 4 days. And I'm not even trying to get more traffic!

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Blog Appreciation:

If you've used WordPress for any time at all and you don't know who Lorelle on WordPress is, you need to have yourself checked out. She's another new addition to my feed reader.