You probably want to encourage your readers to leave their mark on your blog through comments, because this kind of input can further the discussion and help you improve your blog posts. That much is clear. However, spammers and other evil-doers can ruin the party for everyone. In general, Akismet is able to catch most of the spam that comes through your blog’s comment form, but it won’t catch everything.

One of the simpler ways to get past the spam bots that may visit your blog is to install the simple SI CAPTCHA WordPress plugin. Chances are that you are already familiar with the CAPTCHA form from other websites. The image of text is shown in the comment form and a real person must enter this text perfectly in order for their comment to get approved. This won’t prevent manual spam, but it will be quite effective against most bots.

The SI CAPTCHA plug-in can be implemented in the comment form, of course, but it can also be inserted as part the registration form on your blog if you have one. Trackbacks and pingbacks bypass the CAPTCHA deterrent, so if those contain spam, they’ll still get through. You can also set it so that the CAPTCHA does not appear for users who are logged in or for admin users. JavaScript is not required.

For more information and to download the plug-in, check out the WordPress plugin directory.