Askimet
In the fight against these, Akismet has been a long time leader in anti-spam WordPress plugins. However since Akismet is no longer free, we thought to investigate some other options out there, to see if they are just as good.
The feedback on some alternative plugins has been great. So feel free to check out these options, that almost makes coughing up money for Akismet unnecessary:
Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.
6 Top Free Alternatives to Akismet
If you have a WordPress blog, you may have experienced comment “spam” from time-to-time. You know which ones I mean… left by a company name, their comment looks generic or irrelevant, and they are just after a link to their website.
Growmap’s Anti Spambot (GASP)
This plugin will add a client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer. It is a lot less trouble to click a box than it is to enter a captcha and because the box is genereated via client side javascript that bots cannot see, it should stop 99% of all automated spam bots.
Anti-Capture
When a comment is posted without a valid Anti-Captcha token, it shall be instantly marked as spam. This way, you can always manually approve this comment in hindsight if it appeared to be sincere.
Defensio
Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your users. In addition to simple spam filtering, we also provide world-class malicious content detection, profanity filtering, URL categorization, script detection and much more.
Advanced features such as support for OpenID, detailed statistics, charts and counter widget are also available.
Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.
AVH First Defense Against Spam
The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served by identifying them at the Project Honey Pot, a local blacklist or the local IP cache. Visitors trying to post a comment are checked at stopforumspam.com. Stop Forum Spam is not used to check before content is served due to the amount of requests, which overloads their infrastructure.
In Summary
As we make ourselves more and more difficult to sell to, so will spammers try harder to get to us, in the vain hope we approve their comment or even visit their website and make a purchase.
It obviously works or they would have given up by now.
What do you think? Is spam reducing? Increasing? Or about the same? What tool or plugin do you use to combat the barrage?
Feel free to share your thoughts below.
