I have written many posts on my battles with WordPress comment spam but all that appears to be coming to a very satisfactory solution. I am now no longer using any comment spam plugins and I have stopped moderating comments on this blog.
How did I get to this enviable position? Well, it has been a long road and I have learned loads about WordPress along the way.
I started down this road by trying various comment spam plugins with different degrees of success. However, none were really satisfactory. The best one was WP-Hashcash – best in that it was most transparent to the user – but it requires commenters to have Javascript turned on in their browser. So I kept looking for another strategy to eradicate this scourge from my blog.
I upgraded from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5 (the current version) – WordPress 1.5 has a number of anti spam comment features natively built in.
Of these, I have set the number of links allowed in comments to 3 – any more than that, and the comment is auto-moderated.
I have populated the blacklist with a short list of words (just over 40) – any comments containing these words are automatically deleted – boom! No notification to me, no notification to the commenter.
I have written a custom .htaccess file which blocks a lot of potential spam commenters at the gates. Instructions on how and why I set it up are here.
And finally, I have installed Dr. Dave’s plugin Referrer Karma. I know, I know, I said I didn’t have any comment plugins, but I don’t. Referrer Karma is a referrer spam plugin which just happens to work like my .htaccess file (but much more elegantly) to block the bad guys at the gates.
The combination of these measures has allowed me to turn off moderation on the comments on my blog – and so far (one week later) no comment spam has made it through my defences. I’m not saying the war is over but, so far, I seem to have won this round.
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Captcha is shit.
Readers don’t post comments if you have captcha
With my WP blogs that got spam a lot I installed bad behaviour plugin and suddenly I’m not getting anywhere near the levels of spame I was getting.
Have you had any issue with WP blocking comments that were not spam? Or not allowing moderation of comments that it deemed “bad”? My account is showing a huge number of so called spam and I don’t believe that all of the comments are spam, but it will not allow me to check them.