For the longest time, gravatar.com was having troubles serving up the thousands of icon requests from blogs around the world, but it appears that — for now at least — they’re back up and running at full speed. I’ve just re-enabled display of the icons on Command-Tab, and it doesn’t appear to incur much of a performance hit. I’m glad to see some other images around the place instead of the default Mac “shadowy figure” you get stuck with if you haven’t yet signed up for this great little service.

WordPress 2.0 is almost here and sports a long list of new features, including the Akismet antispam plugin I rave about, as well as a backup plugin to keep your site safe. I can’t wait to upgrade, and may do a bit of a redesign shortly after (my CSS is ridiculous in size, and is still broken here and there). Having messed with a number of blogging systems on my own machine, I can yet again highly recommend WordPress for its two-minute installation, nearly infinite customizability, and overall ease of use.

Mentioned briefly in my post about the comment spam filter Akismet, WordPress.com is out of beta and open to anyone who wants to sign up. Not to be confused with the downloadable version at wordpress.org, WordPress.com is a free Blogger style site where you can create an account and instantly run a blog powered by (you guessed it) the WordPress publishing system.

Akismet is a new comment spam defeating system designed by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Instead of filtering all comments locally, each comment’s data is sent out to the Akismet servers and tested among spam for other sites to create a far more accurate judgment of it’s validity. The only prerequisite is a WordPress.com API key, which can be signed up for at their site. Installation couldn’t be simpler, too. Per their public request, I’ve disabled other comment spam plugins such as Bad Behavior (which may or may not fix RSS issues a few people are having). So far, I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to use. Time will tell if it really works. If you’re interested in using it on your own site, you can check out their FAQ, or go right ahead and download the WordPress plugin.

Update: It’s been 15 days since I activated Akismet and disabled all my other comment spam plugins, and so far I’ve seen only one unmoderated spam comment, while Akismet has blocked 1477 others. Those are impressive results! Also, WordPress.com is out of beta for those interested in getting an API key.

Lately, I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam on Command-Tab. Fortunately, WordPress (combined with an extensive “bad word” blacklist) has been able to catch 100% of it, so you never see it. However, I have to deal with the comments held in moderation and actually delete them. I’m wondering how to stop it altogether…

I’ve considered several options, including challenge/response schemes like a question or a captcha image script, but I want to make it as easy as possible for real humans to leave comments (without registering — I don’t like that idea), but near impossible for an automated machine.

For now, the spam is from a specific few IP addresses, which I’ve blocked altogether by blacklisting them in my .htaccess file. What are your suggestions on stopping comment spam?