[...] I’ve been using Hostgator to host my blog for a little over a year now, and I think it’s finally safe to say they’ve proven to be a reliable shared hosting service, so much that I decided to become one of their affiliates. Although I’ve never received hordes of traffic to see how well it could hold up under heavy load, I’ve never had trouble with my site during those times it’s gotten stumbled either (where it’s received hundreds of visitors within a short period of time). My highest peak was when I had about 130 active visitors to my blog at once (and still the server merely yawned). Tickets to help support for one reason or another have always been promptly answered, but my best experience had to be when I was having trouble logging into my WordPress admin one day. I first spoke to someone via live support, who tried his best to resolve the issue on his own before having me open up a ticket so a sysadmin could look into the problem. In the space of about 20 minutes, a systems administrator named David had me up and running after learning that a problem with my Akismet plugin was causing my blog to lag. After I deactivated Akismet and replaced it with a newer version, I was up and running again. [...]

I have to agree, seeing more competing plugins would provide incentive for developers to continue improving their products (and maybe their support as well).

It does not help you too much but the NucleusCMS community have no commercial core and so is more “classically open source”. The anti spam community got together and simply wrote plugins, piles of em in every form imaginable. There are two good captcha the one the core writers made and one I made that uses RE:Captcha. Some guys even came up with an anti-spam API that is in core for CVS (meaning next release it’s part of the framework) and the result is that a sort of survival of the fittest kicked in and for say the three or four plugs that sucked one or two ruled. Of those some had keen developers and others were picked up on by better coders and expanded.

I’m thinking WP needs far more competing plugins for spam. While Akismet is known to be very effective it is not the only game in town and as a default is very privacy intrusive.

Just my 0.02 * 4 worth.

It’s actually already running, one of the many plugins I have installed.

Well, if you’d run fewer than 300 plugins….

At least toss in Bad Behavior. It blocks several thousand a week for me — and it catches them before SK or Akismet are even aware.

I liked Akismet because of its convenience, but I had no idea just how badly it could affect my blog’s interface when something goes wrong till now.

I think I may end up using Spam Karma too somewhere down the road, only problem is one of my plugins isn’t compatible with it. Worse yet, I can’t remember which plugin it was either.

I’ve generally had decent luck with Akismet, but I’m back to running the Bad Behavior / Spam Karma 1-2 punch combo.

I find them very effective.

I do run an additional Spam Karma extension that passes comments through Akismet as well — but if akismet isn’t responsive, things just keep on working.