Fighting WordPress spam

December 8, 2005 11:35 AM

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)

posted by Robot Johnny to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

Best answer: Spam Karma 2

All you need. Tweak the settings a bit, and you can be 99% spam free.
posted by griffey at 11:47 AM on December 8, 2005

Griffy is right. Spam Karma 2 is very effective (even without tweaking).
posted by Handcoding at 12:09 PM on December 8, 2005

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.
posted by mmoncur at 12:23 PM on December 8, 2005

Third the spam karma.
posted by Medieval Maven at 12:23 PM on December 8, 2005

Yep, either SK2 or Akismet will be the way to go.
posted by BrandonAbell at 12:25 PM on December 8, 2005

mmoncur, I used to get a lot of spam with Hashcash. With SK2, maybe one a month slips through.
posted by scruss at 12:44 PM on December 8, 2005

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.
posted by mmoncur at 12:52 PM on December 8, 2005

Spam Karma, two blogs, no spam whatsoever.
posted by XiBe at 1:52 PM on December 8, 2005

Response by poster: Sounds like Spam Karma it is! Thanks, kids!
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:57 PM on December 8, 2005

SK2 definitely. I run it on four sites.
posted by mrbill at 2:02 PM on December 8, 2005

Best answer: 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.
posted by madman at 8:48 PM on December 8, 2005

I love Akismet. I've had it on for a week or two now, and there have been no false positives or false negatives.
posted by danb at 9:10 PM on December 8, 2005

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 :)
posted by thermistor at 4:48 PM on December 9, 2005

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.
posted by anildash at 12:21 AM on December 11, 2005

Response by poster: 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!
posted by Robot Johnny at 4:01 PM on December 12, 2005

thanks, I neededd this. Just started to get hit with about 100 a day spam for no reason on a WP board.
posted by edgeways at 5:14 PM on June 13, 2006

Best answer: 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.
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:00 AM on October 6, 2006