Last year I wrote about how Akismet didn't satisfy my spam-blocking requirements and why I disabled both Akismet and all trackback/ping notifications. Needing to have trackbacks disabled has been unfortunate because it's fast becoming an important part of blogging. I just found and installed the Simple Spam Filter plugin. It is designed to be used with Akismet and only prompts the visitor with a reCAPTCHA if their comment fails to pass Akismet's spam block. This should help to eliminate any false-positives, but let's see how well this fixes trackback spam (I'm hoping Akismet is better now than it was a year ago). Enjoy the CAPTCHA-free comment forms while you can!