Fighting Over 2000 Spam Comments A Day – Here is How

I have been dealing more and more with spam comments lately. Apps for Spammers got smarter and Akismet just can't handle them all anymore.  Since when I started this blog few years back I had to deal with spam comments. The situation however does become increasingly painful since several months due to more and more clever spam software.I wonder if it's because Akismet isn't evolving much and all the spammers now get through it or the spambots just got sooo much clever now?

What to do? I started to look at some captcha plugins first, but then I stumbled through a simple plugin which leverages a simple check box instead of captcha, because captcha is no fun. But there is more options and plugins around so I'm not telling you that use only those two I'm showing in this post. No. But I”ll show you those I'm currently testing (with a success, because over night there was no spam in the spam comment folder!).

As I mentioned, no need to say that captchas are sometimes annoying, so avoid.  Another problems you can have when seeking for a anti spam plugin is that the plugin don't work properly with your WordPress theme, so the compatibility is probably number one to be satisfied.  So In no particular order I'll show you some spam plugins I'm testing.

First Option

This plugin is quite revolutionary and simple to use with just few options. The plugin's name is G.A.S.P . What't that? GASP means? GASP stands for Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin and its function is quite unique.

The plugin is done by Andy Bailey who is also an author of CommentLuv plugin.

Quote from the plugin's page:

Client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer. It is a lot less trouble to click a box than it is to enter a captcha and because the box is genereated via client side javascript that bots cannot see, it should stop 99% of all automated spam bots.

Get the control back …

Features:

• Provides simple checkbox for validaing that you're human (no captha needed) by using client side javascript for generating
• You can set the maximum amount of comments that user can have in the moderation queue to protect you from comment floods
• No longer spambots can think that they got links on your site by removing all links from comments that are waiting for moderation

While I don't think it's possible to stop all spam comments, this plugin can contribute to eliminate most of them.

GASP is free WordPress Plugin. Get your copy and test how effective is for you blog.

Second Option

Anti-Spam plugin by Webvitaly is a plugin which does not have any options to configure at all and don't uses captcha either, but it seems very efficient, even if it's only the free version. The creator provides also paid version (go for it if you find it useful).  Ideal candidate? Possibly. Get your copy to try yourself.

Features:

• no captcha, because spam is not users' problem
• no moderation queues, because spam is not administrators' problem
• no options, because it is great to forget about spam completely

Quote:

Two extra hidden fields are added to comments form. First field should be filled with unique code. Second field should be empty. If the user visits site, than first field is answered automatically with javascript, second field left blank and both fields are hidden by javascript and css and invisible for the user. If the spammer will try to submit comment form, he will fail to fill code-input with correct code or will try to submit an empty field and spam comment will be automatically rejected

As I said there is paid version (I think the price is like $12 or something like this – quite steal). The paid version has some more efficient algorithms and has some options you can tweak.

Last option

If you're giving up fighting with spam comments on you blog,  you can simply deactivate them. Sure, but this isn't very community friendly…. As an alternative to fighting spam bots and spam comments I'd recommend externalizing the comments completely. Systems like Disqus fight the spam for you as the comment system is completely hosted on their side. Including the spam filters.

However by migrating your comments to Discuss you'll lose a control and hand. If their service goes down, so your comments. But it's quite possible that their infrastructure might be more robust than your simple blog. In addition you'll ease some the load of your web server too … -:).

I never thought that comment system could possibly affect me so I had to deal with such a problems on my blog. However it's a reality, and I'm curently testing the first two options only. If in any case I'll have to change I'll possibly go with Disqus before turning the comments off completely.

Stay tuned for more…