Comments on: Fighting WordPress spam

Question: Fighting WordPress spam

Robot Johnny — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:35:21 -0800

Best spam-fighting solutions for WordPress?

WordPress does a great job of keeping spam comments from being published, but I still get LOTS of spam piling up in my moderation queue, and it's just as a pain in the ass to delete them from within the queue as it is had they been published as actual comments.

What are the best plugins/combos/solutions for combatting spam comments using WordPress? (FYI, my site is currently set up to allow comments from anyone who has already had one approved comment, and anything else must be moderated)

By: griffey

griffey — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:47:20 -0800

Spam Karma 2

All you need. Tweak the settings a bit, and you can be 99% spam free.

By: Alex Handcoding

Alex Handcoding — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:09:29 -0800

Griffy is right. Spam Karma 2 is very effective (even without tweaking).

By: mmoncur

mmoncur — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:23:11 -0800

WP Hashcash. Don't settle for 99% spam free, this one keeps me 100% spam free on six different popular sites. And it requires no configuration or maintenance.

Of course, there's a catch: it prevents users with JavaScript disabled from commenting on your site. I'm willing to live with that.

By: Medieval Maven

Medieval Maven — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:23:24 -0800

Third the spam karma.

By: BrandonAbell

BrandonAbell — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:25:00 -0800

Yep, either SK2 or Akismet will be the way to go.

By: scruss

scruss — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:44:08 -0800

mmoncur, I used to get a lot of spam with Hashcash. With SK2, maybe one a month slips through.

By: mmoncur

mmoncur — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:52:56 -0800

That's weird, maybe it was set up wrong - I get about 150 spam comments a day on my biggest site and hashcash blocks 100% of them. (and I'm using the old version.) Every couple of months someone bothers to manually enter a spam comment, but that's it.

By: XiBe

XiBe — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:52:37 -0800

Spam Karma, two blogs, no spam whatsoever.

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:57:13 -0800

Sounds like Spam Karma it is! Thanks, kids!

By: mrbill

mrbill — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 14:02:25 -0800

SK2 definitely. I run it on four sites.

By: madman

madman — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 20:48:46 -0800

If you run a busy site (as in lots of people commenting), I would lower the severity settings for SK. In particular, disable the "snowball effect" filter, or people commenting often on your site might find themselves blocked as spammers.

By: danb

danb — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 21:10:31 -0800

I love Akismet. I've had it on for a week or two now, and there have been no false positives or false negatives.

By: thermistor

thermistor — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:48:18 -0800

Anyone interested in trying a different kind of blog spam filter could try one that I am working on, sxore. It's in a closed alpha right now, but I can probably wrangle a few invitations for those interested. It has a captcha to prevent spam, single sign-on across multiple blogs, and provides an aggregate comments feed of all comment threads you've posted to.

(Disclosure: I work there :)

By: anildash

anildash — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:21:06 -0800

If Movable Type's an option, it automatically deletes junk comments after a period of time that you can set. There's a free version which can import from WP.

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:01:51 -0800

Thanks for the Spam Karma suggestions everyone -- I installed it the other day, and it's already been a lifesaver. I am getting great enjoyment out of seeing the spammers' attempts obliterated!

By: edgeways

edgeways — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:14:58 -0800

thanks, I neededd this. Just started to get hit with about 100 a day spam for no reason on a WP board.

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:00:53 -0800

An update: I have been using Spam Karma 2, however since SK2 logs all spams and stuff on a local database on my server, my server eventually started to crash because the database's table got too big -- that's how bad the spam was. I've recently uninstalled Spam Karma 2 in favour of Akismet, and not only does Akismet just work better and fighting spam, but my server runs like a cloud now.