Reduce Your Comment Spam
UPDATE: Don Not Use WP Spam Free right now. the plugin is actually working a little too well at some things despite what the author claims. This plugin is in need of a serious overhaul. Not only can it prevent you from getting legitimate comments by not recognizing your javascript settings, it can prevent incoming and outgoing pings to your blog. I am currently recommending Akismet complimented by Bad Behavior. If you want to allow unmoderated comments I suggest you add a math captcha
As you may or may not have figured out blogs get a lot of comment spam no matter if you are nofollow, dofollow, moderating or not moderating comments, using human interface spam protection (captcha) or not. That said there are a number of ways to reduce the amount of smap you see. The first plugin you are introduced to with Wordpress is Akismet, despite coming standard with wordpress it is not worthless, unlike the hello dolly plugin. Simply activating this will reduce the spam you see by a hundred fold. That said I don’t think it is the best plugin to use.
I like a three plugin approach for managing comment spam. The first is WP Spam Free, This plugin is as good as Akismet for the same kind of spam blocking but takes it a step further. You can keep using akismet but it seems to take priority and still suffers from a frustrating number of false positives. Angering readers trying to make comments isn’t a good way to keep them. The second thing WP Spam Free does is eliminate the need for any sort of captcha protection. In fact you should not use one while using this plugin as they can corrupt your install. This sort of active plugin will also allow you to stop moderating your comments before publication if you like, making for a more interactive responsive reader experience.
The second anti-spam plugin is WP Comment Remix. The best part of this plugin for me is the ability to directly reply to and quote other comments. That isn’t the only feature thought. If you have commentators who regularly come back to abuse your your nofollow status you can either spam or simply delink the authors link from the comment. I often times have to do this because authors make meaningful comments adding to the discussion, but link to affiliate and porn sites. Frankly if anyone is going to make affiliate or porn money from my blog, it should be me. However providing an active link to those sort of sites is bad for your google ranking and can earn you a reputation you don’t want from certain blogging communities.
The last approach to spam control is the most drastic and not one I use very often. WP Ban by Lester Chan works wonderfully even if the approach is rather draconic. You can ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress blog. Used wrong you could end up banning a public hotspot so you need to pay attention to how you use this feature.
In the end if you want lots of comments turn off your moderate comments, add CommentLuv & KeywordLuv and advertise yourself everywhere you comment as yourname @ A DoFollow Blog. If you do that and add these comments you can become a comment superstar.
