Recently I wrote a post about some tips for making your WordPress site more secure.
Now that your site is all secure, you might want to tackle another bane of running a site – comment spam!
Do you despise it as much as I do!?!
If you’ve got a WordPress site, I’m sure you’ll have seen that it comes with the ‘Akismet‘ plugin. Akismet is a spam killing system that’s running by Automattic, the company that ‘looks after’ WordPress (and runs the hosted WordPress solution wordpress.com).
Akismet can do a great job, but there are a couple of things that can make it less attractive:
- To use it, you need an ‘API Key’ from wordpress.com This is pretty simple to get, but it’s another account to signup for – which if your self hosting – is all you’ll ever use it for…
- It’s only free for personal/non-business sites. If you’re running a business blog or site you should really pat $5 month for a single site or $50 a month for multiple sites!
Although Akismet comes pre-installed with WordPress, that doesn’t mean that it’s the only top spam killing solution out there. Here are a couple I use (and that are free!):
Antispam Bee
Don’t let the fact that the plugin page is in German put you off – this is a great spam killing plugin!
It uses a number of factors to sort the spam from the ham including the IP address of the commenter and checking the contents of the comment against a database of known spammyness. There also some nice features such as auto blocking comments from a specific country (or countries) and limiting comments to only be allowed in a certain language. It can also be used in conjunction with ‘captcha/number problems’ that prove people are humans (although I don’t like use those on a usability level…)
You can view the spam numbers it’s caught in the Dashboard.
Spam Destroyer
This isn’t the cleverest of anti-spam solutions, but it works really well! There aren’t any settings, just enable it and it gets to work.
Spam Destroyer uses and combination of a cookie and a hidden field to trap bots. The vast majority of spam bots aren’t clever enough to get round both of these traps.
The only ‘bad’ thing about Spam Destroyer is that it doesn’t currently work happily the with Jetpack plugin…
What Do You Use?
You can also use both Antispam Bee and Spam Destroyer together – to trap (most) bots and spam that’s put in by ‘real’ people (some spammers employ very cheap 3rd world labour to manually spam sites to get round bot traps…)
So that’s a couple of ways I deal with spam on WordPress.
Do you have any other ways you kill spam?
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
I use a combination of Mollum and Bad Behavior. Seems to work well.
Raoul Snyman says
Actually, I use Disqus comments. I think I’ve had one single instance of spam since moving. I don’t know if I’m just not getting any (which I don’t think is the case) or if their spam filtering is top notch (more likely). Also, you can import your existing comments from a number of systems into Disqus.
I blogged about moving my Drupal blog over to Disqus, in case anyone else using Drupal wants to know how to migrate: http://christianoss.org/blog/2012/08/14/moving-disqus-comments
Derek Simeone says
I’ve had really good luck with GASP (Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin). I really enjoy that it’s lightweight, doesn’t transmit content to remote sources for processing, and actually stops spam instead of just relocating it for me to read later.
Eric Dye says
Exactly! And because it isn’t just relocating the SPAM, it keeps your server from having to process it.
Lucien says
So far, I’ve used Akismet on all my WordPress site – always with the same key, no hassles – and it has always worked smoothly, removing all and only spam comments.
If Akismet ever stopped to be free, then I’d drop it and probably go with “Growmap Anti-Spambot Plugin” (or GASP) or Antispam Bee (I’m a bit wary of the second, as it seems to be in German).