@photomatt told me to use Akismet, it works. I could qualify for free, but I’m paying $5/mo – because if it works, it’s worth it, and they deserve to be paid for it. I’ll report later how well it works. I disabled my other two comment spam plugins that only worked relatively well.
Thanks Matt!
Dave
I’m downgrading from Pro to Personal today, because I’ve been a little dissatisfied with false-negatives, meaning spam allowed. I have go in a couple times a week and delete 10 to 50 spam comments. And it’s hard, b/c I don’t want to accidentally delete a real comment, so I have to read each comment and decide: is this real or spam? Some are obvious, some are clever. For every 1 that slips through, 100 are blocked. I’m seeing about a 1% false-negative rate. On a positive note, I’m not coming in a couples times a week and purging 1000 to 5000 spam comments! I can handle 10 to 50. But, I’m not willing to pay for it anymore.
Think I’m going to go back and try this again: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-free-wordpress/