I began this site in December 2008 and have attracted many spammer comments. I did some researching and learned that I must have approved a spammer comment somewhere along the line. This has caused more spammers and bots to find me and attempt to add comments to my site. I have Akismet and that has worked great! Akismet has stopped the attempted postings but this has caused me to be less than productive since I need to sift through all the comments, research IP addresses and try to figure out who is real and who is spamming me. I began searching for ways to stop spam comments and found a WP spamfree comment plugin that also has a counter widget that I can display on my site.
Scott Allen @WPSpamFree on Twitter™ had developed a brilliant plugin that I highly recommend for anyone using WP for a blogging site to download this plugin. Scott has incredible customer service, is very professional and I do not think any question you may have (even if YOU think it is dumb) will ever go unanswered. He took the time to answer a question from me and I am not very technical at all. He was even prepared to give me virtual CPR incase I needed it. Thanks Scott! The WP spamfree comment plugin and counter widget is going to save me tons of time and I hope to inspire someone out there to help kill spam by implementing this cool tool on their site today!
You said right that wordpress provides many such plugins which is very helpful in preventing the spam. You also have provided a nice option.