Brandon Fenning

Since the vast majority of WordPress spam is automated in nature, the goal of BotBlocker is to block comment spam bots and not hinder users. This is accomplished through the use of honeypot technology, which tricks the spambot into identifying itself by performing actions that a human could not.
BotBlocker’s features include:
<ol>
<li>Works out of the box to block spam</li>
<li>Automatically stops spam-bots from commenting</li>
<li>Zero hindrance to users: no CAPTCHAS, math questions, passwords or extra input required</li>
<li>Zero false positives and ignores registered users</li>
<li>Can be configured to completely block spam-bots or flag comments as spam</li>
<li>Spam detection messages can be easily adjusted</li>
<li>No javascript or cookies required</li>
<li>Hooks into <code>wp-comments-post.php</code> to prevent spam-bots from directly submitting spam comments</li>
<li>Should work fine with most customized comment forms</li>
<li>No API keys required</li>
</ol>
http://www.lform.com/botblocker/ for more information.
Plugin by <a href="http://www.lform.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">LFORM, a web design company</a> in New Jersey.

BotBlocker

Kills spam-bots, leaves humans standing. No CAPTCHAS, no math questions, no passwords, just spam blocking that stops spam-bots dead in their tracks.

scribu

Whenever I visit my site’s dashboard, the first thing I see is the bold red Spam count.
Instead of wasting time deleting spam comments, I prefer to let Akismet do that automatically, so I don’t need to see how many spam comments there are.
This little plugin simply hides that part.
Links: <a href="http://scribu.net/wordpress/hide-spam-count" rel="nofollow ugc">Plugin News</a> | <a href="http://scribu.net" rel="nofollow ugc">Author’s Site</a>

Hide Spam Count

Hide the annoying spam count from the Dashboard.

BotBlocker vs Hide Spam Count