Double-Barreled Spam Blaster: Two Kick-ass WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins
by jim on January 7th, 2010Bargaineering gets hundreds of comments a day… and most of them are spam. Even this blog, Wangarific, with its small audience, gets about two dozen spam comments a day! Spam can be one of the biggest headaches for a blogger and dealing with it is both a waste of time and energy.
At one point, I even changed my comment form to post to wpcXXXXXX.php (changing the number ever so often), instead of the standard wp-comments-post.php. I did this because spambots would just post comments directly to wp-comments-post.php. By changing the filename, they would get a 404 whenever they tried this tactic (actually, I added a Redirect in my .htaccess to redirect them to google.com so my server wouldn’t waste resources processing the request).
Fortunately, I stumbled onto a series of plugins that has pretty much stopped all spam in its tracks. It requires no CAPTCHA and no extra work to implement. Simply active/install these two plugins:
- Akismet: This plugin is included with every WordPress install, so simply activate it. You may need to get an API key to get it to work but that’s fairly trivial.
- WP-SpamFree: This plugin absolutely crushes spam. It works like magic, takes two seconds to install, and it has stopped a ridiculous amount of spam. In fact, the spam doesn’t even appear in the spam folder anymore. You can download it here.
Finally, just to be sure, I auto-moderate each commenter’s first comment and any comment with a link in it. This will put it in the moderation queue so I can review it manually, this catches about two dozen comments each day.
Save yourself some gray hairs and install these plugins. 
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January 7th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
How does WP-SpamFree compare to Bad Behavior? I installed that one and saw a HUGE reduction in my spam folder. Which one is best?
January 7th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I think that if you don’t have a spam problem now, it’s not worth fretting over because what you have works. If it starts becoming an issue, you could try different plugins. These are just the two that work for me.
January 8th, 2010 at 2:00 am
Just disable comments on older posts (or/and posts with no recent comments) – it killed 99% of spam for me and I believe there is a WP plugin for that
January 8th, 2010 at 10:18 am
I’ve been using NoSpamNX, which places a false field in your comment section, then hides it with CSS. If the field gets filled out the comment is automatically either a) marked as spam, or b) deleted before it even hits your inbox or spam queue. Obviously the latter option is better.
I also moderated links in comments, and this has done wonders for catching spam and increasing productivity.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Just looked at WP Spam Free. I like that it features a spam free contact form, which is something NoSpamNX doesn’t offer. I get spam through the contact form every so often (maybe only once a week or so), so I’ll give this a try. Thanks.
January 10th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
I’m so sick of spammers. Right now I use SpamKarma but some of them still slip through. I don’t have an API key for Akismet, maybe I’ll get one and try it out.
January 11th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Thanks for the WP-SpamFree suggestion. I’m going to give it a shot on my blog.