As my regular readers know, last month I removed the old CAPTCHA system on commenting (where you have to enter the graphical letters and numbers to post). At that time I activated the Akismet plugin that comes bundled with WordPress to help combat spam.
Since that time, Akismet has caught 7,000 spam messages (as of this morning). Out of those 7,000 spam messages, only 1 message was caught that wasn’t spam. That is an amazing number.
I contribute to WordPress development as time permits, but never really used the Akismet plugin. Now I am kicking myself in the ass for not using it earlier. It has made life so much simpler and made the site much better. Kudos to Matt and rest of the Automattic team for this great plugin!