Even a relatively patient person like me eventually gets tired of deleting comment spam. I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1, and installed the highly-recommended SpamKarma plugin. Hopefully, this will allow legitimate comments to appear immediately, without waiting for moderation, while filtering out all of the Online Poker ads. Please let me know (somehow) if your comments are being blocked incorrectly.
Land and Hold Short 
This is my own test comment — it this appears, then it made it past Spam Karma.
I’ve been using SpamKarma for months now. It took the spammers many, many months to realize that my blog isn’t running on MovableType (although I still see attempts to access mt-tb.cgi even now), but so far it’s deleted a bunch of real spams and falsely accused one person who had the comment form up for several hours before he got around to submitting his comment.
If you install “Paged Comment Editing” as well, comments that were flagged as spam can be gotten to and either retrieved to be posted or mass deleted.
Here’s my test comment.
Not that I’m jealous or anything, but I’ve never had a spam comment on any blog.
Blogger has just put capchas (however you spell that) on their system, but I think they are only triggered by posting comments or posts in quick succession, not single comments or posts.
Looks good.. I just installed wordpress for someone else (through guru.com).. I like the clean look.. but it lacks a few things I’d like to see. I’m a pre check ride student and I’ve enjoyed reading your site… I’m just getting my feet wet with software called Serendipity. Wish me luck as the check ride is scheduled for the 27th!
Best of luck on the check ride, Jared — just stay relaxed and do what you already know.
WordPress does have a lot of plugins available. Did you check them to see if you could find any missing features?
Actually no I didn’t… I’d evaluated 4 different packages and for the moment I’m happy with what this one can do. It also seems simple enough that I could write my own plugins if there is some feature I really want. I’m part of that slashdot crowd you see.. 😉 Lately I’ve been reading with great interest about the laptop based GPS systems out there.. seeing as I may be in the market for one soon. Compared to the standalone units that cost at least as much (if not more) the idea of a computer based one appeals to me.. it’s an area I’m familiar with. I’ve built one into my truck before… the only problem being a daylight readable small touch screen… but it seems those are readily available for aviation. Those combined with the XM weather looks pretty slick for a portable unit.