End Comment Spam
February 1, 2009 | Posted by Kat 
Akismet has protected your site from 14,476 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.
Don’t you love it when you see the above message. Nothing in your spam queue. No pages of links with descriptions that would make your grandmother blush. No more needing to weed through the spam looking for the errant comment or two that is not spam. I used to have hundreds of spam comments a day. Now I have none.
You see, very little spam is generated by new (or not so new) webmasters trying to get a free link back to their site. Most of the comment spam I was getting was from automated spam bots. Askimet would send the comments to the spam folder, but I still needed to go through them to catch the errant real comment that had been flagged as spam. I don’t have a lot of extra time to go through page after page of spam comments, so often I just had to hit the “delete all spam” button and hope for the best.
WP-SpamFree has changed all that. It is a simple plugin for WordPress that is easy to install, easy to use, and doesn’t do anything to annoy my real-life commentors. No Captcha, no challenge questions.
Direct from the WP-SapmFree, here is the list of features:
Features
- Virtually eliminates automated comment spam from bots. It ensures that your commentors are in fact, human.
- A counter on your dashboard to keep track of all the spam it’s blocking. The numbers will show how effective this plugin is.
- No CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions or other inconvenience to site visitors – it just works.
- No false positives, which leads to fewer frustrated readers, and less work for you.
- You won’t have to waste valuable time sifting through your Akismet queue anymore, because there won’t be much there.
- Now with Trackback and Pingback spam protection.
- Easy to install – truly plug and play. Just upload and activate. (Installation Status on the plugin admin page to let you know if plugin is installed correctly.)
- The beauty of this plugin is the methods of blocking spam. It takes a different approach than most and stops spam at the door.
- The code is has an extremely low bandwidth overhead and won’t slow down your blog (very light database access), unlike some other anti-spam plugins.
- Completely compatible with all cache plugins, including WP Cache and WP Super Cache. Not all anti-spam plugins can say that.
- Options to completely disable trackbacks and/or pingbacks if they become an excessive nuisance. While doing so can reduce the connectivity and community feel of the blogosphere, it has been much requested since the glitch in 1.3 that inadvertently blocked trackbacks and pingbacks. Many people actually liked this. So, the choice has been given back to you.
The plugin uses a combination of java script and cookies to weed out automated spam comments. It works quietly in the background and most of your readers will never know it is there. For the few that do have java script or cookies turned off on their computer they will be prompted to turn them on to leave a comment.
I have been using this plugin for over a week now and I love it. You see, my grandmother wasn’t the only one blushing at the content of my comment spam!
Categories: Blogging, Web Site management, WordPress Plugins | 
Tags: block spam, comment spam, WordPress Plugins | 
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