I have decided to kill the Spam Kara 2 software that was protecting this blog because it deleted a string of legit comments. I want to thank the commenter for bringing this to my attention.

The new spam software protecting the blog from comment spam is Akismet. This Plugin comes preinstalled with Wordpress and I highly recommend it. Akismet is a collaborative effort. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. There is no blacklist because part of the idea of Akismet is that you are always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. So far the software has performed flawlessly.

To turn on Akismet just go into the Plugins section of your Wordpress control panel and activate it. The software does require an API key however. You can get a free key by signing up for a Wordpress account.