Trying to look after a WordPress blog is an enormous drain on your time.
There are the perpetual updates to WordPress, each of which means a backup of your web site first.
There are the theme updates which mean lots of testing to see what they break.
The battle with spam is a daily chore, distraction and annoyance.
Trying to find add-ins which work is another time-waster. I cannot find one which both works and yet does not silently lose valid comments. Capchas reduce it a little but are an annoyance. Akismet is as buggy as hell and makes valid comments silently disappear. Blacklisting iPs does not work. Keyword blocking does not work much.
I had such great plans, but all the spare time I want to devote to writing is spent in maintaining the WordPress product and deleting the spam.
It is all such a dreadful waste of my time and energy.
Akismet – silently loses comments and the ‘ham’ and ‘spam’ statistics are nonsense and lost comments do not increment the counters. Yet the spam still comes through. Worse than useless.
Captcha – just an annoyance.
GASP: Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin – adds another annoyance (a prompt which is in the wrong place anyway) but effectively does not work: it has stopped less than 0.4% of spam.
IP Blacklist Cloud – I have spent hundreds of hours with this and it makes no difference. All I am doing is contributing to a worthless IP address blacklist with the plugin author then sells.