Comment spam is a huge problem. I filter my comments by blocking all comments with offending keywords, e.g. levitra, cialis, poker. Still, I often have a delete a few spam comments throughout the day. (I always update my blocked keyword list when I do.) Last night, I decided that I wanted to judge the effectiveness of my blocking procedure, but I had no record of any blocked spam. So I altered my “add comment” script to not just block obvious spam, but record it to a “spam” file. So now I know: Just overnight, my comment script blocked 51 spam comments. I never imagined it would be that many!

Update #1: Whoops! My “view all recent comments” script was including the segregated spam in its display. That’s fixed now. Oh, and I have 8 new blocked spam comments in the last 40 minutes. Wow.

Update #2: Notice the just-added link to the Most Recent Comments and NoodleFood RSS Feed at the top of the page, just to the right of the search bar.

Update #3: Last night (7/17), I added a simple addition problem to the “add comment” form to catch the spambots. To my amazement, that method has trapped every bit of comment spam, almost 200 messages, without the need for any regular expression filtering whatsoever. Hooray! If and when the spambots catch on to my new method, I’ll just tweak it.