Having a website with comments means fighting a tireless battle against spammers. They want their url mentioned online because that’s how Google decides who’s important and who ranks first for any given keyword search. The spammers are persistent.
I use a double barreled approach. There’s Akismet, from the same people who write WordPress itself. It identifies characteristics common to spam, then just throws those comments away.
Until today I was also using WP-SpamFree.
A week ago what was a garden hose of spam became a fire hose! The rate of spam comments probably didn’t increase. More likely some spammer just found a new way to look human enough to penetrate my defenses.
Tonight I swapped out WP-SpamFree and replaced it with Anti-spam. I like Anti-spam because its method of trapping spammers seems foolproof.
Spammers send out thousands, maybe millions, of comments every day. This is automation at its most destructive. The spam bots look for forms and are armed with enough answers (names, email addresses, comments, etc.) to get a message in.
Anti-spam adds two questions to each comment form. Then, using javascript, it hides them so humans won’t see the questions. Bots avoid javascript. It slows them down. That lets them see the questions you don’t!
Answer the extra two questions, you’re a spam bot! Foolproof (they say).
I hope it works, because right now spam is driving me a little nuts. Akismet alone blocked 26,340 spam comments last month! I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in.