Every blog gets spam comments. These are the weird machine generated comments that proclaim Viagra is the best thing ever and it’s attached to your blog article about dangling participles, so to speak.
Fortunately, there are some very good spam control plugins for your WordPress blog. Here are the ones that I use for controlling (not eliminating) spam:
The standard anti-spam plugin most all WordPress blogs use is Akismet. Akismet checks your comments against their database and see if they look like spam or not. You can look at your spam (woo-hoo!) for 15-days and then the program will delete it from the database. If your WordPress installation doesn’t come with this standard, go grab it.
I tried this plugin just for the name! Bad Behavior operates a little bit differently than Akismet. Instead of after-the-fact seeing a comment and then comparing it to a spam database (everything is past tense, so to speak), Bad Behavior instead looks at the behavior of the “spambot” as it is looking at your database and denies access. Spambots, believe me, operate differently than cool users.
I loved this name too. Since all of us would like to have people contact us via E-mail, spammers come into a site looking for e-mail addresses to spam. I don’t like that. What Obfuscate E-mail does is take the html coding of your E-mail addresses and turn the address into hexadecimal idiocy known only to the plugin. E-mail passes wonderfully through the system, but machines can’t translate random idiocy any better than humans can.
TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter
A plugin that does a simple sanity check to stop really obvious comment spam before it’s processed. Why waste your blogs resources on obvious spam comments?
Does spam still make it through the Ten Keyboards blog in spite of four plugins for controlling it? Yes. Humans are very inventive when it comes to creating code to sell or phish you. So the last thing I do for comment spam is that I moderate comments. All comments need to be approved by me before making it to the blog.
Now, I have no issues with real comments — they are encouraged. But, if I left the comments to be done without moderation, I’d end up with Viagra competing with dangling participles — and my Mom wouldn’t like that.
Scot
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Grigor 06.20.07 at 10:13 am
Hello Scot,
I have Akismet installed on my blog. Problem with it is that it sometimes do it’s job too good and it happens that real comments end in a trash can if you don’t check spam once again. Having another instance, like Bad Behavior can help.