Akismet doesn't cut it anymore, utilize Cloudflare against spam

I have been noticing a severe drop in spam in my comment queue. I used to have to delete anywhere from 5 to 10 comments a day in the queue with just Akismet. Now there's not one comment.. 99.99% of the time.

I didn't really think anything of it until I just realized why this change occurred; I had enabled Cloudflare for my blog.

Cloudflare acts as somewhat of a firewall and CDN in one, it blocks malicious requests and serves cached versions of your blog/site/resources. For this particular blog the stats aren't that overwhelming, but for one of my other sites we're talking about multiple gigabytes!

The Cloudflare plugin for Wordpress doesn't only adjust the incoming IPs (they have to change it to the X-FORWARDED-FOR) but it also will tag any comment (and accompanying meta-data) as a spammer in the CF system.

So with my efforts and those of the other thousand of Cloudflare users combined, the spam queue is getting smaller and smaller every month. Making Cloudflare a better spam protection than Akismet.

The spammers don't even get to reach the stage where Akismet has to kick in.