I have two pet peeves when it comes to preventing spam:

1. I’m lazy and don’t want to moderate every single comment.
2. Making readers enter CAPTCHA letters is annoying and just isn’t cool.

Fortunately, here’s two plug-ins for worry-free and unobtrusive spam control:

Akismet

Both a service and a plugin, Akismet eliminates spam by running hundreds of tests on every comment and checking it against a database of known spammers. It’s built-in with every WordPress installation, but you’ll need to [register for free API key](http://akismet.com/personal/ “Personal User API Keys) to activate it.

Once activated, it’s virtually worry-free. No need to maintain blacklists or cumbersome moderation rules.

Moderate Brief Comments (The best little-known plug-in ever)

Akismet isn’t perfect. It sometimes misses spam comments containing very few words. For example, a 3-word spam comments such as “discount viagra anvenve” can pass through unflagged.

I searched endlessly for a plug-in to check the number of words in a comment, and send those that are too short into the moderation queue. No luck.

Before giving up, I posted my dilemma on the WordPress forums. Within a day, moderator Kaf Oseo (Kafkaesqui) wrote a plug-in and posted it. This is why I love the WordPress community!

[Download Moderate Brief Comments](http://guff.szub.net/download/moderate-brief-comments.php “Moderate Brief Comments)
View instructions

Besides spam, the plugin’s also useful for eliminating lame short comments such as “Hey, thanks” or “Keep up the good work.”

After installing and activating both plug-ins, LifeClever is now virtually spam-free. If your blog allows readers to receive comment notifications via email, this also means less spam in their inbox.

So to deal with the possible future spikes in traffic, I’ve started testing out some ways of optimizing WordPress and the virtual private server I have hosted on RimuHosting.

So far, I’ve installed the Digg Defender and WP-Cache plugins for WordPress. Digg Defender sees traffic from digg.com and redirects it to an external cached version of the page on a free service called Coral Cache. Ricardo Galli, author of WP-Cache, describes his plugin as:

An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

Installation of the two plugins were pretty easy and I’m now looking into optimizing the server itself. I found this link:

Streamlining your webserver

The instructions are for Gentoo Linux, but it looks fairly adaptable to my installation Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know, I know, nerd alert! I’m still a newbie to managing a web server, so I won’t pretend to know the best way to do this. At this point, it’s gonna be trying out new things and seeing if it works.

If gracious readers have any further advice, feel free to offer suggestions in the comments. Feedback, both negative and positive, are always welcomed.