I've had this post lingering around unfinished since I upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 1.6.1 on the 10^th November. It was quite a coincidental thing, the blog had only been up since the middle of September and I'd been inundated with tons of comment spam for V1aGr4 and the like. I'd set up the two Extensions that come with BlogEngine to prevent comment spam but without much luck.

StopForumSpam seems to be truly dreadful amounting to just 43% accuracy by it's reckoning, but not one comment it approved was legit. Akismet on the other hand was 100% right when it decided something was spam, it just didn't make that decision often enough.

My next thought (rather obviously in this day and age) was to go and investigate adding reCAPTCHA to the comment form, believing it wouldn't be too hard. There was probably a plugin for it and if not, I'm a Developer by day, I can just go and bang it in there. 

As it happened BlogEngine.NET 1.6.1 had been released in April (just how I'd ended up with 1.6 and not 1.6.1 I'll never no) so I upgraded using the manual upgrade detailed on this post and in about 5 minutes it was up and running perfectly(!) and I haven't had a single piece of spam since, admittedly I haven't had any normal comments either but...

Here's a link to the article on CodePlex detailing how to enable reCAPTCHA on your BlogEngine.NET blog.

I just want to give a quick link to this guy who has a rather obvious fix for getting CodeFormatterExtension working on BlogEngine.