This seems promising so far, though I wish they’d have an option for displaying spam details in a web-based log, rather than requiring I look at the SQL database.

As far as I know BB looks at the actual HTTP request and runs it against common spam profiles like bogus user agents and IP addresses.

Do you have any more details on how Bad Behavior works? Perhaps I’m missing something on their site and am just being tardful.

I’ll give BB a shot, so to speak.

I’ve had really good luck in the past with YAWASP, which replaces the normal form field names (“author”, “url”, etc.) with randomized text every 24 hours. Since these fields change all the time, the theory is that spammers can’t adapt. It also has a hidden field that shouldn’t be filled, but which spammers often fill. There’s no visual or functional difference to humans. Recently, however, I’ve been getting a few more spams that are able to make it past the randomized fields, but still fail in some other way that results in their messages getting dropped to the spam queue.

Ideally, any method of blocking spammers that I employ would allow for the spammer (and their spam) to be submitted to Akismet, so that others can benefit from my detection of spammers.

I understand that CAPTCHAs are a little annoying and time consuming, but I’ve found that reCAPTCHA is considerably less so than things like the CAPTCHAs on Blogger. The fact that one can easily refresh the CAPTCHA if the words are illegible is a plus as well.

I’ll disable reCAPTCHA for the time being and let BB run for a week or so. Hopefully it can catch some bad guys.

Give it a try before you resort to a CAPTCHA, it would deter me from posting comments. I had to refresh the reCAPTCHA 4 times to get one I could read.

I publish a few WordPress plugins (My Link Order, My Page Order and My Category Order) and have been using it for 3 years now so hit me up if you have any questions.