7 WordPress Plugins to Fight Against Spam

WordPress blogs are being attacked by spam on a constant basis. It’s really quite amazing how often Eazy Cheezy gets spammed with Viagra and other spammy comments. In fact, if you look in the bottom right hand corner of my site, you’ll see that my favorite spam plugin, Akismet, has counted almost 20,000 spammy comments. Keep in mind that I’ve only been using the WordPress platform for a few months.

Below you’ll find some of the best and top-rated WordPress spam  control plugins to help prevent your blog from getting bogged down by spam.

Akismet (4 Stars, 345 Ratings) – My spam protection of choice. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service. If it looks like spam, you’ll get to review it in your admin panel. You can also display a spam counter (as I have in my sidebar).

WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam (4 Stars, 147 Ratings) – Eliminate comment, trackback and pingback spam. This plugin also features a spam counter to display on your site.

Yawasp – Yet Another WordPress Anti-Spam Plugin (4 Stars, 13 Ratings) – Takes care of the spambots and gives you the option to block them.

Bad Behavior (4 Stars, 48 Ratings) – Blocks link spam and spambots. It works by analyzing the delivery method and software used to help protect your blog.

Nofollow Reciprocity (5 Stars, 6 Ratings) – This tool works by placing “no-follow” tags on the spammy links that link to your site.

Sabre (4 Stars, 28 Ratings) – Plugin that blocks against spam registration to your blog.

Cryptx (4.5 Stars, 9 Ratings) – Hides all the e-mail addresses on your blog from the spiders crawling your site.

Have any other great spam fighters you use in WordPress? Any favorites listed above? Feel free to share any tools I may have missed.