Blocking spam with WP-SpamFree
WP-SpamFree is the plugin that I use for automatic filtering of spam.
So far there's only like 5 spams that went past out of the 1000+ filtered ones, which is a 0.5% false negative rate. Pretty good I'd say. Of course a 0.5% false negative rate's not good for sites that get thousands of comments per day, but I'm pretty sure it would suit the needs of most WP installations out there 
Rubbish attracts flies
Immediately after the previous post on the list of SSH user IDs used in attempting the brute forcing, the blog has suddenly gotten a lot more attention...
...from spammers. The number of blocked spam jumped by over a hundred in the span of just a day!
Perhaps it would be good to be careful on the wordings used here, don't want Google to be flagging this site as a malicious site
So THAT’S how they do that!
Have always wondered how those people commenting in various WordPress blogs get to have their own custom avatar. Now I do know how...
Somehow chanced upon this site (http://en.gravatar.com/) which allows you to set a custom avatar, so that when you comment on supported platforms like WordPress, it appears along with your comment. Neat huh?
How you use it is like this:
1. You register for a Gravatar account.
2. You tie one (or more) email address(es) to that Gravatar account.
3. You upload avatar(s) into your Gravatar account.
4. You tie the avatar(s) to the email address(es) in Gravatar.
5. Go to the (WordPress) blog post and add a comment. You need to fill in the email address to be the same as one of those you registered into Gravatar.
6. The corresponding Gravatar appears along with your comment!