Thank you for the links. Is there a downside to having too many spam blockers. I’m thinking I may use all three of them.
Yes there is a downside. Generally there is a downside to using too many plugins or more than you need to. You would be putting every comment through 3 times the spam processing that it should require.
You should try to avoid that. There must be 1 solution good enough. I myself use askimet but I also manually accept all comments. Have been for 2 years and I’ll keep doing that until my traffic doubles. Maybe another 2 years.
I reply to all comments though.
You may simply want to setup the need for manual accept when someone adds a url to their comment, else automatically accept it. Requirement for the author to have a previously manually accepted comment before further comments are automatically accepted. This at least allows them to continue conversation without slowing down the flow.
There is very little downside to using those three comment plugins, though. I try to respond to most comments, but there’s a practicality issue in that.
I try to put as few manual intervention barriers between users and posts as possible. With just those plugins, I rarely have to un-spam or otherwise manually fiddle with a post past replying.