I love blogging and I love WordPress. And so do comment spammers. If you've got a brand-new blog, you've probably got a month or so before the spam comments advertising everything from pharmaceuticals to porn start. Here's how to keep them off your blog.

• Akismet looks at the content of comments left on your blog, and analyses their spamminess. Comments it believes are spam don't appear on your site; instead, they're moved to a 'spam queue', where you can delete them all at once, or even let Akismet delete them automatically for you. Akismet ships with WP, though has to be activated before it will actually start to work. For small and new sites, it's probably all you need, but as your blog grows more popular and becomes more visible to spammers, you'll need to use additional plugins to keep spam under control.

  The problem with Akismet is the 'false positive': comments it thinks are spam, which in fact are legitimate. Sadly some of my favourite commenters on all my blogs have been hit with this, and anyone who links to a Blogspot blog seems to be more than likely to be marked as spam.

  So it's always worth checking your spam queue for these before deleting it all, but if you have dozens or hundreds of spam comments every day, it becomes impossible. You need a couple more plugins to stop spammers before they even get to Akismet.

• Comment Timeout allows you to close posts to new comments after a set length of time. Comment spammers tend to target older posts, so by shutting off comments, you significantly reduce their opportunities to spam. The plugin has some neat configurable features, including the ability to leave comments on selected posts open indefinitely, and to designate posts with high numbers of comments as 'popular' and entitled to have comments left open for a longer period of time.
• Bad Behaviour... ah, what can I say about Bad Behaviour? It saved my sanity. Rather than looking at the comments themselves, BB looks at the thing trying to leave the comment, analysing if it's a human, or a spam-bot. If it's a spam-bot, it's blocked from even accessing your site; not only does this block the spam, it also stops email address harvesting, and saves you bandwidth usage. If I could only pick one plugin to take to a desert island, it would be Bad Behaviour.

Using these three plugins together, TameBay has gone from receiving over 1000 spam comments per day, to almost zero: comments in our spam queue these days are more likely to be false-positive matches, than real spam.

Tags: Akismet, Bad Behaviour, Comment Time Out, plugins, spam

Posted by Sue on November 19, 2008 in Plugins, WordPress.