The Akismet plugin is a must have for WordPress. A spammer found me the other day and left 250 spam comments. All of those comments were flagged by the internal WordPress spam filters, but those filters still leave something to be desired. For example, each comment is held for moderation, which generates an administrative e-mail for each instance.

I've read good things about Akismet, but hadn't enabled it because it requires a WordPress API key. It's free and simple, but still an extra step that I didn't feel like taking. Now I'm glad I did.

Akismet intelligently analyzes all comments before the internal filters kick in, so all of my spam comments now go to Akismet's own administration panel for moderation. Akismet is worth the effort just to avoid the avalanche of "please moderate" e-mails.