However, now that my personal blog gains more and more popularity, I am still receiving several bad comments a day that made it through the filter, and most of them look legitimate, but when you check the attached URLs you find they’re mostly spam.

The comments usually contain pleasing comments about your website/blog without direct reference to the actual content. They’re as superficial in wording as your daily horoscope.

I took all possible preventions and settings including removing the website field in the comment section. Still, I did receive more and more spam including the website reference, indicating to me that these spam attempts were not posted by human beings but programs. Under the Settings->Writing screen I disabled the Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC (just as a precaution) but to no avail.

Here is my recommendation to prevent spam on your WordPress blog:

1. Install the WP-SpamFree plugin, unless you have already done so. It performs better than the standard Akismet plugin.

2. Under the Settings->Writing screen I disabled the Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC settings.

3. Under Settings->Discussion disable the Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) option. That setting doesn’t do a lot to attract web traffic, anyways.

4. Whenever you modify an existing post disable the Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page option.

5. Install the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin. This plugin adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots.

It is usually not recommended to use CAPTCHA on the comments form, because it apparently annoys readers when they would like to respond to your entry. However, I believe, these days everybody is used to entering the CAPTCHA code. Everybody understands the concept of proving the comment was made by a human being. Spam is a widespread problem these days, and it effects everybody.

Miraculously, since the installation of the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin, the spam counter on my personal blog had stopped! That does not necessarily mean, there are no more spam attacks; it merely means they don’t reach the spam filter anymore.