Eliminate spam comments in WordPress

In Blog, Wordpress by Simon

On many of the sites I am responsible for, increasing volumes of spam comments are becoming a bit of a chore to deal with. Akismet is all well and good, but they have a paid service for commercial websites, and in my experience many comments thatare clearly rubbish still get through. So I had to bite the bullet and introduce a new ‘spam gate’ on the higher traffic sites using WordPress. This isn’t a detailed review, but below are listed 5 anti-spam plugins that were tried, tested and rejected. They were rejected for being either incompatible with some themes, too convoluted to install (SweetCaptcha… great concept, but over complicated), or plain didn’t catch spam effectively enough for me. The one I ended up selecting is at the bottom… still early days, but so far so good!

 

  • Enmask Captcha – no longer supported
And the one that trumped all of the above, is plain and simple ‘Captcha‘. It installs with ease, is compatible up to version 3.2.1 and not surprisingly has a 4.5 out of 5 rating in the WordPress Plugin directory. The way it works is presenting a simple maths question, mixing numbers and words – so for example 4 + three = ?. I personally can’t stand some of the captcha solutions you see, that are sometimes barely readable even by humans…. yeah Facebook & Google you know what I’m talking about! You can add any text you want before the question is presented (i.e. “we just want to ensure you are not a robot!”). The options screen is very simple and this is a sound choice.