I’ve Been Trying to Avoid This. Or, Comment Spammers can Byte Me!

This is just getting beyond ridiculous.

Today's email from my primary spam filter:

There are currently 0 comments in moderation

There have been 957 comment spams caught since the last digest report 1 day, 1 hour ago.

I've been waging war against the damn comment spammers for months. I've cranked up the sensitivity of the filters to the point where now it's starting to block legitimate comments.

Oh how I loathe comment spammers.

I also don't particularly like "captchas" — those annoying little boxes where you have to enter some magical text to prove you're a human. But I *really* don't like my readers comments getting flagged as spam, and I don't have time to moderate my way through almost 1,000 spam comments a day.

So it looks like I'll be implementing a captcha shortly. I've got a plugin to try (Filosofo Comments Preview), and will probably play around with others over the weekend. If you know of a WordPress captcha plugin that you like, drop me a comment. Hopefully it won't be flagged as spam…

Update: Currently testing Peter's Custom Anti-Spam. Let me know what you think!

[tags]blog comment spam[/tags]

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John L. Wake - Realtor

Jay,

When I set up Word Press last winter, Askimet was included standard. I can see why. Comment spam is not a problem anymore for me! I was thing blogging wasn't worth it sometimes because of the comment spam. Give it a whirl.

On the other hand, now that you have set up the captcha you probably won't need Askimet. I expect the captcha will completely solve the problem for you and you will feel like your old self again.

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Jay - The Phoenix Re

Jim / John - thanks for the suggestions. I ran Askimet for a long time, then it just seemed to not work as well. Now running SpamKarma and Bad Behavior, but they have recently started flagging valid comments as spam. So I toned down SpamKarma and added the captcha. We'll see how that does....

Jim Duncan

Jay -

Askimet has been very good for me for the past several months. Before that, I used Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, the combination of which worked extremely well.

The captcha was clear to read (many aren't) and not too-intrusive.