Both the http:BL and Simple Spam Filter for WordPress plugins have been updated within the last 24 hours. Both have improvements that make them only a little better than before. For me, a little is a lot when it comes to spam.

In my article, I'm Getting Zero Spam Comments, I bragged that I wasn't getting any spam comments. That was four days ago. Since then, I only received one or two a day and they were caught by the Akismet filter. Those comments didn't look like spam at all to the naked eye. In fact, two of them were pings from splogs.

Before installing these two plugins, I had tried several anti-spam plugins and I didn't like the amounts of spam that slipped through, no matter how much I tweaked them. Sure, now it takes three filters to handle my spam, but it's worth it. I've noticed the spam mutating too often for a single all-in-one solution to work all the time.

The http:BL plugin blocks known spammers, the Simple Spam Filter plugin doesn't allow comments containing bad words and expressions to be posted at all (unless you're a human and you have to confirm it) and the Akismet plugin checks everything that doesn't get blocked. I think my days of dealing with massive amounts of comment spam are over.