After coming back from Las Vegas to 200 pieces of smelly comment spam, I knew it was time to get help. Thanks to Joan Donogh of In Formation Design, who designed and hosts this site, I discovered that WordPress has a built-in filter for comment spam. All I had to do was register for a WordPress.com account and I received by e-mail the free key to turn on Akismet (short for Automatic Kismet).
It’s not only super effective, the Akismet people have a sense of humour. You can go in (under “current activity”) and check to make sure a legitimate comment wasn’t tagged as spam; the program saves the spam in a database for 15 days before automatically deleting it. Today it said it had caught 46 spam comments, and added: “You have no spam currently in the queue. Today must be your lucky day! 
”
I’m a happy girl.
One Comment
As a P.S., Akismet informed me today that it has saved me from 166 spam messages since it was activated. It’s quite a pleasure now to be notified of a comment, because I can be sure it’s a legitimate one!