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Once a Wordpress blog is up, the first thing to do is to set up counter spam measures. Surely it is a hassle to start with but as the blog gets more popular, spammers with find their way to you. And there are plenty of anti spam Wordpress plugins out there and picking them up is pretty easy. Here are my choice of anti spam Wordpress plugins:

Akismet
This big fella is installed by default in Wordpress 2.3 and above. And has been working pretty wonderfully for me. Yes, users have to jump an extra hoop by registering an account at wordpress.com just to get the Akismet API key. But that is a small price to pay for instant protection (sort of).

But then, any decent blogs will still get spammed and Akismet will do a decent job of sorting out drugs related comments from your real fans common. And most blog owners will having this urge to check their Akismet spam list to see if any unfortunate comments are mislabelled as spam. And that is a real time drain. Enter the next anti spam Wordpress plugin:

Maths Comment Spam Protection

A very small plugin that separate real commenters from spam bots. Installation requires tweaking of the comment.php presentation file. There is a 5 step installation guide to this and it should not be really difficult for anyone to get this Wordpress plugin up and running.

Also the plugin is very clean and does not use any JavaScript.

Seems like we have covered all angles? Not true, spammers knew that comments anti spam plugins are popular and advanced spammers continue their trade via trackback spam. Something that was covered by the creator of Maths Comment Spam Protection Plugin. Hence we need the next anti spam Wordpress plugin to counter trackback spam:

Simple Trackback Validation

Plug and play. Just download, upload (am I making sense here?) and enable the plugin and wave trackback spam goodbye.

So here we have it. The essential Wordpress Plugins to combat spam. There are plenty of other plugins that does the same job, and these three plugins had did wonders for me. Use them.