Porkchop Technology Review's

I have been having lots of problem with spam lately with Wordpress and have found a solution that fixes it and is working for me perfectly now, reducing my spam to 0 in Akismet.  Wordpress spam is a serious issue for people who use Wordpress, what happens is someone uses a program or script online and sends massive amount of posts to blogs around the net, the classic one and most popular form of spam is the Nice blog, then tons of viagra links in the bottom.  Spam can damage a Wordpress site easily, what happens is that google and other search engines will detect you have links to site’s that are banned on your blog and you will most likely be taken off google and other search engines for having those links.  So basically your SEO score can go to zero if you have spam on your blog.  Another problem with Wordpress spam is that if someone does hit you with a large amount of spam it can cause your Web Server to crash, and you can have a mini denial of service attack, since comments go directly to your email after one posts one. 

Being new to Wordpress, I started without a spam filter and that was a mistake, then I used Akismet, it was an alright spam prevention but not enough, since you still saw the spam in your spam folder and it allowed these spammers to keep posting, usually filling up the spam folder with tons of spam messages.  The other method I was using was blocking IP’s through .htaccess the spammers who kept spamming non-stop and use the same IP, I would put them on that, that of course sometimes worked since most of those spammers used proxies to hide there IP address.  I even reported a spammer to an ISP company, I recorded their IP and did a WHOIS search and found out what ISP they were on and sent an email to their abuse department and they quickly contacted me to send them server logs of the event, and they dealt with that spammer, but this of course takes lots of time and effort to do on each spammer. 

The next thing I saw, when I looked at my comment box, thinking what could limit the amount of spam from even coming into the Akimest spam folder, then it came to me captcha phrases would do it!  What are captcha phrases? Captcha phrases are the box on forms that are usually random color, lines in text and numbers.  So in order for someone to post something they will have to manually enter in those letters that randomly appear on each refresh of the page.  This will eliminate most of the automatic spam bot software around and also make it a pain for spammers to keep posting new spam messages since they will have to read that box and input the text over and over again.  This is how I eliminated almost all spam from my blog, since Akimest does work great and is community based, the way Akimest works is it picks up current keywords, urls and text and if it misses something your suppose to mark it as spam, so it then gets sent to the Akismet database to block in all future spam posts done the same way.  But Akimest lacks in the department that you still receive this automated spam, and you still have to review it for comments that are actually not spam, this way the  captcha will stop the spam from even coming in, unless there is some determined person sitting there wasting their time filling the captcha form out.  As you can see by looking at the right hand side, Akismet has blocked about 1,000 spam comments, that’s a lot!

The thing that really makes me wonder, is why Wordpress does not include anything to really block spam out of the box.  For example why doesn’t Wordpress right from install have these things already enabled since this is a known and big problem.  They have now recently included Akismet install package in the releases, which is good, but it still is not enough.  I wish Wordpress and other CMS software out there would put more focus on spam, since spam is a serious issue, for example when they created the comment box, why didn’t they think of automatically adding a captcha phrase option to deter spammers, and other features.  Fortunately Wordpress has a huge community with programmers that use the software and create scripts that do this and add them to the website for free to download, but for someone who is new and doesn’t know how to setup plugins this could be a problem.

So these are the plugins I am using and a few that I think are great to use and might try out if spam still keeps coming in, which is not at the moment now:

Akismet very useful needed plugin for Wordpress a must to stop spam – http://akismet.com/

SI CAPTCHA probably the best plugin that Wordpress should have coded in default into their installation, adding captcha random phrases to comment boxes and user register pages eliminating spam bots and deter spam.  The only problem with this is that it is a bit annoying for people who actually want to post since they have to put the letters in each time, but that is worth it for getting rid of spam. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/

InHuman – Another neat captcha plugin but uses pictures instead of typing in a box, it asks to select say all 3 dogs in the pictures instead of phrases and makes it kind of like a game for users, this is something I might try out soon. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/imhuman-a-humanized-captcha/

WP Captcha-Free another interesting plugin. WP Captcha-Free blocks comment spam by using a combination of time-based hash (a.k.a. Time Based Tokens, TBT) and JavaScript (AJAX). When a comment is posted the plugin validates a hash based on time (and some other parameters). Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected. Unlike using a captcha, this does not place any burden on the commenter.  This program I haven’t tried it yet but will probably, the only thing is it requires Javascript which some browsers have turned off. http://wordpresssupplies.com/wordpress-plugins/captcha-free/

There are other plugins available to combat spam on Wordpress and secure Wordpress a lot more, I suggest going to http://wordpress.org/extend/ and look at what they have, but these are the plugins I use to combat spam and my experience using them.

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