Avoiding Blogger Comment Spam

I notice a lot of Blogger blogs have been having trouble with comment spam recently. Although Blogger have introduced a word-verification option, it's a bit of a pain to use. A better option is to fool the spam-bots by getting rid of the "post a comment" link. Replace it with some other text, e.g. "Add a comment", and the bots will never find it. At least, that worked for me in the past. (Now I use hacked commenting forms anyway.)

If you want to give it a try, just search through your template for the following code:
<$BlogItemCreate$>

And replace it with the following:
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogid=INSERT-
BLOG-ID-HERE&postID=<$BlogItemNumber$>">Add a comment</a>

(But without the line break!) Note that you have to change the above code to insert your blog ID at the appropriate place. You can find your blog ID displayed on the address bar when you use the Blogger editor or the comment pages of your blog. (The address will be something like "http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6642011", in which case my blog ID is 6642011)

As always, be sure to save a backup of your template (e.g. by copying and pasting into NOTEPAD) before making any changes.