Winning The Comment Spam Battle
It looks like I might just be on the winning side of this battle against comment spam, thanks to the discovery of a new WordPress Plugin.
I’ve installed WP Captcha Free onto two blogs that were getting hit very heavily by comment spammers. Tens of comments per day were being left on each blog, a lot in Russian!
Now in a few days between them the two blogs have just 2 new spam comments. That is a good deal of success in my book. It is now possible for me to spend the time carefully reviewing the spam to make sure that it is genuine spam, rather than quickly rushing through pages of rubbish.
WP Captcha Free is never going to catch all of the spam and it not intended to. But, it will catch the repeat offenders and it is them that seem to cause the problems.
It works by encoding within the comment form the current time. Spammers take a copy of this form and keep submitting it. The first time they submit it the timestamp will show a recent time, so their rubbish gets through. After that the timestamp is out dated and the comment is ignored.
This is much better than captcha. The problem with captcha is that the user must read and retype the characters. Not on the whole a problem, just an extra step, an annoyance and some times very difficult to read.
Plus, there are on the internet pieces of code that can now read and automate the typing of captcha fields, so that has been broken. I think this is a very good solution.
Related posts:
- Trying to beat the comment spammers
- Beating The Comment Spammers
- 9 Essential WordPress Plugins For Every Blog
- Important WordPress Plugins To Try Out
- No More No Follow!
- No More NoFollowed Comments!
- Methods To Making Comments To Generate More Traffic
- Spam selling expiring domain names
- Domain Renewal Spam From Domain Services “This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing”
- Why No NoFollow?
August 15th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
I use Block-Spam-By-Math but still getting at least 10 per day. Did you have any probs installing WP Captcha Free?
August 16th, 2010 at 7:45 am
Hi Grant, no, I found absolutely no problems at all with the WP Captcha Free installation, just downloaded, activated and it’s doing the job really well. Hardly any spam at all gets through now and people leaving comments do not need to do anything!
August 16th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
I’ve just installed WP Captcha Free and I didn’t have any problems either, I think it’s a great little tool. It seems to be preventing most, if not all spammers and the people commenting on my blog don’t have to try and decipher a captcha, I highly recommend it.
August 16th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
I totally agree Tom!