Stopping spam without CAPTCHA

I decided to try to stop spam without CAPTCHA. I’m using a service called Akismet. It is free for personal blog use.

Akismet was originally developed for integration with WordPress. You can now use it’s public API anywhere though. I’m using it via the Django comment framework.

For commercial use it’s anywhere from \(50 / month up to \)1,000 / month depending on the frequency of usage.

I also setup email notifications for myself so I get emailed whenever a new comment gets posted.

For the news item I also set rel="nofollow" so any link posted won’t count for search engine optimization (SEO).