I have not allowed comments from users in my blogs because I’d rather spend my limited time writing blog posts than reading and approving comments or deleting spam. But recent comments about comments in another thread here are making me re-think them. I figure I can try them out on a few blogs to see if it results in more traffic or boosting the time spent on the blog.
I was wondering if you Wordpress bloggers rely on the built in tools and plugins for comment management or if there are some 3rd party ones you like. And do you make people register at your blog in order to post? Or use captcha?
Conran turned me onto spam by math with my wordpress and since installing it I have yet to see any spam come through. Before that I woke up my first morning and had 300+ spam messages, not sure how that many people found the blog, but they where there.
Try cloudflare.com to firewall known spammers. Excellent service, even speeds up your website with their optimization schema. Also a Wordpress plugins.
Another vote for Akismet - works really well. Also set things up so the user’s first comment always goes into moderation.
Bottom line, with Akismet comment moderation won’t take you much time. Just be careful to never approve general comments about how wonderful your site is or comments that ask general questions - those are usually spam.
The tracking/affiliate codes will be if you opt-in for email protection or to track outbound links. It won’t hurt your SEO, they’re not that type of links. Personally I don’t use that feature so it’s fine.