It seems that the blog spammers have upgraded their auto-spamming scripts and simple tricks like changing the posting filename are no longer working. Apparently, the new blog spammer bots actually parse through the blog page to discover the name of the posting script.

I’ve started getting 30-40 spam posts per day over the last week or so. This isn’t really a huge problem, since WordPress catches certain "spam keywords" and throws the posts into the moderation queue. However, I have the blog set to auto-email me when a new comment is posted, so I get deluged with a flood of emails…

Enter, the WordPress authimage hack:
This is by FAR the most effective anti-comment spam hack that I’ve seen. This hack generates an image containing a random series of letters and numbers. In order to post a comment, the visitor has to look at the image and enter in the code. Since spam-scripts can’t read images, they can’t post! Nice!

You can download the WordPress authimage hack here:
http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376

Let me warn you: This hack takes a while to install and requires modifying several core WordPress files. But, in the end, it is well worth it. You can see what the hack looks like in the comments section of this blog.

BTW: Yes, I’m well aware that some spam scripts can read images. However(thankfully) those scripts have not yet reached a point where they can read slanted images with little contrast(like those that authimage generates). So, for now this is an excellent anti-spam solution.