How to deal with SPAM comments?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jamie Heinrichs: I started a blog on the website for my roofing and siding business last March. ; Is it normal to have ;had around 1500 spam comments since then. ; I have to approve the comments, so they aren't all posted to my blog. ; The problem is that it takes time to go through and mark them all as spam and it makes the web traffic statistics on my site inaccurate. Does every website have this problem or am I missing something?
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  Primary Image Ltd: It's a very common occurrence and indeed a real nuisance! There are various tricks you can put in place, like hidden fields that spammer robots automatically fill out and then you know it's very likely a robot, or dare I say captcha checks (although spammers can get past those now!). There's also crowd-sourced spam monitoring services that look at incoming comments across thousands of websites, so these services can check trends or if other users have spammed similar messages.
  
  I see you're using #WordPress  ;for your website. Did you know there's lots of anti-spam plugins that could help with one of those techniques above?  ; Mike
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  Brent Wildman: Unfortunately spam comments come with the territory of having a blog. There are a lot of anti-spam plug ins and tricks you can use to cut down on the amount of spam being generated.
  
  On my clients sites I always disable the commenting and add in Facebook commenting. This drastically reduces the amount of spam and allows for easy integration into social.
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  Ian Dixon: You could always activate Akismet +Jamie Heinrichs ;
  Well you could if you have a spare $50 a month to pay for it anyway because it aint free like most try to tell you.
  
  I use a wordpress plugin called anti spam bee which is free and very effective
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  E.Dieter Martin: Other options are the use of disqus or Google+ comments to limit the spam activity.
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  Romany Thresher: There are other anti spam plugins that are free and yes Disqus or Google+ Comments.
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  Logan L: +Jamie Heinrichs ;Akismet works very well for filtering out comment spam! +Ian Dixon ;I've never had to pay for it and I use it on about 20 sites...
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  Ian Dixon: Check this URL to see how 'free' Akismet is +Logan L ;
  I would say that with 20 sites using it then you would need the Enterprise plan at $50/month
  
  Akismet is free for non-commercial use though Automattic never seen to fully implement that rule
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  john writer: I think +Brent Wildman is right in case of territory but my wordpress akismet is useful in .com not in .org please explain
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  Logan L: +Ian Dixon ;I guess I've been using the personal plan all along... ;
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  Jamie Heinrichs: Thanks for the helpful discussion.
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 02:14:46 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/how_to_deal_with_spam_comments