Re: BBPress: No Support in the Forums
Sorry for delays in answering, been without power/internet for a week now. Sitting in coffee shop to try and help answer questions here.
To answer your question:
bbPress does come with support for Akismet built into the newer vs. This will give the same protection that comments presently have. Akismet alone, is imo pretty much useless though.
I would also consider installing other plugins such as honeypots (traps that only bots fill out), moderation plugins, and there are also a ton of tricks you can add to your htaccess file that will also help a bit. I don’t have a list of everything I use as it’s on a home computer but will post a list whenever I can.
The biggest problem we are fighting right now is with actual people spamming the forums and not bots. That is pretty much impossible to stop and requires a lot of tedious work by the forum moderators to keep things clean.
As to IntenseDebate:
Well to each his own on that one. I personally don’t like anyone else having access to my comments, even if it is just to help stop the spam. Same reason I personally don’t run Akismet.
Finally keep in mind that custom post types (topics/replies) are simply just data in the db. It is entirelly possible to build plugins like IntenseDebate to work with bbPress should you so choose to. It all comes down to a matter of demand as to whether the actual companies will write a custom plugin for bbPress, or whether or not you actaully pay to have it built yourself.
