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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd put some serious resources into dealing with comment spam. I realize it'll always be an issue, but they could at least:

1) not make comments enabled out of box with no anti-spam measures (moderating isn't anti-spam in my opinion: technical solutions should come before man-power)

2) not make me rely on third-party plugins to combat it

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Akismet, while a plugin, is included in the default WordPress install -- it just has to be activated. I'm not sure how a standalone install of WordPress would competently fight spam in the automated manner you're advocating. Since spam techniques are constantly evolving, it's a pretty challenging machine-learning problem to stay a step ahead. That's where services such as Akismet come in.

http://akismet.com/how/

I think the issue is that good spam detection systems, at this point, require a server to do all of the processing. This is why they created Akismet and provide integration by way of a plugin.

Akismet does a great job dealing with comment spam. Activate it and input your API key and you're done. Even other applications like PHPbb and "insert PHP content management system here" have problems with spam, it's not as easy as you think to detect and deal with spam.

I've used other pieces of software, even some paid-for PHP features, so I agree as to the spam problem. I was thinking more along the lines of disabling comments by default, and making it a bit of a chore to enable, to make point-and-click installs less of an attack vector.

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