The biggest reason I switched from the previous blogging software I used to Wordpress, is the amount of spam I used to receive. I didn’t really know how well Wordpress dealt with spam, but I had to try something else, removing blog spam all the time became a tedious and repetitive job. So, I installed Wordpress, and enabled the Akismet plugin. It works great. It moves all known spam out of your way (you could review it if you really like, but I’ve never seen a false positive in my spam queue), and if it’s unsure, you can manually approve or deny the spam in the usual Wordpress moderation queue.
Since I enabled it, Akismet has caught 100 000 spam messages. Glad I didn’t have to filter that by hand 
I’ve added the Akismet sidebar plugin as well, it displays the amount of spam messages caught. Thanks Akismet!
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December 5th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Personally I did have some false positives (”Akismet has caught 4,260 spam for you since you first installed it.”) but I can live with that, it certainly still pays off. I do check the spam occasionally though, I’d hate it when a visitor’s comment would be deleted.