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The power of the blog comment has turned commenting into a free-for-all contest for this powerful piece of blogging real estate. As your blog grows in readership and popularity, it will act as a magnet. The blog should entice thoughtful readers to communicate with you. On the other hand, the blog will seem to attract inane, exploitive, and occasionally insidious commentators who want to use your comment section as a means to drive traffic towards another website or to be mischeivious. How do we deal with this blog comment spam?

Here are six ways to prevent spam in your blog's comments:

(1) Enable comment moderation most blogging software has the option of forcing comments into a comment moderation mode. This means that all comments will appear in a queue for the blogger to review before they appear on the blog. You can approve the comments, letting them pass out of the queue and onto your blog. You can also choose to delete the comment so that it never appears. Comments in moderation will be automatically deleted after a certain point in time (e.g. approximately two weeks later). Some bloggers swear by this method because in addition to spam, it also allows the blogger to pick and choose which comments appear on their blog. On the downside, comment moderation can also discourage other people from commenting, preventing potentially rewarding contact and conversation.

(2) Akismet has become a godsend to many bloggers because it has the ability to stop comment spam while letting more benign traffic flow directly onto your blog. Akismet is an add-on program for Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs and can also be used on hosted Wordpress installs. Akismet works just like comment moderation, but more often than not it allows non-spammy comments to appear on your blog without problems. Occasionally Akismet will miss spam and sometimes it will block comments that are perfectly fine. However, most bloggers think that the benefits of Akismet far outweigh any downsides that it might have. Akismet is now commonly used on many blogs.

(3) Another way to prevent spam in your blog comments is to force your users to register with your blog so they can leave comments there. ReadWriteWeb is one example of a blog that requires a user sign-on, as does writer/actor Wil Wheaton's personal blog. This can certainly limit the amount of spam that your blog will receive because it's now harder to place it there. However, this also discourages people who just want to talk.

(4) You can contact the

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