Any recommendations for a good, free spam plugin?

[katese11]

Quick q - have just moved to self-hosted and am having a few bumps but one of the problems is spam-fighting. It seems like I have to pay for akismet and I installed "cleantalk", which worked fine for a while but is now also demanding to be paid for. I've installed a free one now, but it's rubbish - the stats page for it said "everything is going smoothly" while I had 41 spam comments in the mod queue? So, are there any free plugins that work? I'd really rather not add another cost to self-hosting...the idea is to make money, not lose it!

getting rid of spam you already have is almost impossible. to stop any more. use adblock plus, ghostery, and popup blocker, free apps in chrome and Firefox, uncertain if available in IE i will not use it. make sure your internet setting are active, there is a blocker box that gives you the choice not to be tracked. ghostery will stop images appearing on some site, you can pause blocking or tell it to allow, if you know the site is safe. hope this helps

Akismet is a free one, but you have to activate it. You register with them (e.mail), they send you a code, then you add this code somewhere on the plugin page, it will say something like "accepted" and Akismet will start working. A friend of mine have several website on the same hosting, the same account. We were trying to figure it out and could not find anything - so we used the same code for all her sites. And everything is working.

Another one I use together with Akismet is WP-spam free. It was recommended by somebody who is in i-net marketing. You could not find it on wordpress database, you should download it directly from their site. What I like from this one, they have a blacklist, actually it's the same as in wordpress general settings, and you could entirely block some IP's or words. When I started, that time wordpress own feature just moved things to spambox, but didn't block entirely. Don't know whether they change it, I still use WP spam free.

Another on I use sometime instead of the later one is Antispam-Bee. I've read a lot of good references about it and about the way it works on worrdpress related blogs.

Because I'm just a user, not a developer, I have to trust others on the matter. But it looks like those are working for me.

Thanks! I'm sure Akismet was a paid one...will have a look!

As per zanuda, Akismet is free. It works really well too - very few false positives. x

Ah, looks like you have to pay for it if you're a business but not for personal use. Good-o!