We have been experiencing an increase in the amount of comment spam on our blog lately, so I’ve put some time into finding a way to combat this evil enemy. Hopefully this post will help others in their battles against COMMENT SPAM!
We have been running the Akismet plugin that comes packaged with the WordPress platform but as you can tell it is not been 100% spam proof. It seems only the really nasty comments get through. We’ve also noticed that we receive the most spam at night or on the weekends when none of us are in to moderate the comments. Tricky little devils. So recently I put a verification code on the comment form that you have to type in correctly in order to post a comment. I left it for a night but the next morning we were at it again deleting a bunch of comment spam. I wasn’t very fond of a verification code because:
- User may have images disabled in their browsers
- User may be visually impaired (though there are some image verifications with and audio option)
- It’s darn annoying for users to have to type in a code
So I did a little more reading and am now trying 3 plugins together, Akismet, Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior (I killed the image verification). From what I read, using these 3 together are very effective in blocking comment spam. So we’re going to run with this for a while and see how it goes. It probably won’t be 100% spam proof but I hopefully it will cut down the time spent moderating our comments.
P.S. If you guys have any thoughts, experiences or suggestions on combating comment spam lets hear it.
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5:02 pm
Yep I use SK2 by itself and it works beautifully.. I haven’t had one piece of comment spam get through
5:39 pm
Get Expression Engine from pMachine.
7:50 pm
Sweet! Great job Jeff! That nasty spam has been getting in the way of quality dialogue.
I’ll have to look into setting those up on my blog too. Thanks again.
8:23 pm
Akismet’s always worked great for me, combined with a filter through WordPress itself that selects anything with a link for moderation. Very few legit comments require a link.
9:51 am
Thanks for the comments and suggestions everybody. Everything’s been working great so far. No spam got through at all last night. Hoooooray!
3:42 am
I use wordpress with Akismet for my real estate website. It seems to catch almost all of the spam but I decided to moderate my blog comments manually anyway. I wish I didn’t have to do that.
Steve
8:08 am
Steve - these pluggins that Jeff added seem to work very well and don’t require moderation. You might want to give them a try.
8:03 am
Someone else below asked this already about antyspam sripts.
I am getting nailed with Spam on my website mails and in our blog website - now ist offline too
much spam. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up
and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated. http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl
Thanks for help, Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland
10:18 am
iv used 3 antispam plugin and math verification captcha and can’t fully stop autospambots
but here simple method for protection
http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=103
maybe it helped….
11:55 pm
This is what I have at Blogger. I allow annonymous comments because of some regulars I have, but they have to type in a code similar to the one you have. The only spam I get now is an occational live person spamming me.
8:06 am
Guy you need to try out SpamKarma2 from Dave, its really good for spam junk, helped me to get rid of it on my Blogs. tested also Akismet but it didnt worked as good as Spamkarma2.
12:57 pm
Actually, we’re already using Spam Karma 2; but it doesn’t catch legitimate trackbacks from spam blogs.