I finally integrated the anti-spam tool called Akismet into my comments system. Akismet is a third-party app that checks all comments that are submitted and declares them as either spam or not. They use their own methods to run a newly submitted comment through hundreds of tests. If the comment comes back as legitimate then it'll be posted on my site. If it's considered spam, then my site will still save it but mark it as spam so only I can see it. From there I can then go ahead and either delete it, or mark it as non-spam.

I decided to do this because I have yet to completely stop spam from posting on my site. I have tried everything including a CSS hidden field that randomly moves around in the comment form and randomly displays a different label. I've also tried blocking comments that contain certain keywords in the Name or Comment fields. I even went so far as to block certain IP addresses and referrers for accessing the site. But alas, some of the spam bots still got through. While my efforts did lower my amount of spam comments dramatically, I still wasn't happy seeing 10-20 spammers a day getting through.

Implementing Akismet's services into my site was fairly easy and took less than an hour to get up and running. I think I'll give Akisment a few weeks and see how it handles my site and its comments. If all goes well, I'll probably adjust my comment settings to automatically approve every new comment that's not spam (rather than having to moderate comments from new visitors). And if you submit a comment here and it gets declared as spam - don't worry - I'll see it and approve it within no time.