New Weapon Against Comment Spam for WordPress

If you're like me, you probably hate comment spam. We recently developed and released a plugin for WordPress that you guys will love. It's been out for two months and is completely stable. It will virtually eliminate your automated comment spam problems (spambots). Even with Akismet, you have to check the queue to see if any legit ones got caught. No more. Check it out...it's called WP-SpamFree.

Put comment spammers out of business.

 

JS and cookies, interesting idea

 

Thanks. Sometimes effective solutions are extremely simple. A while back I created a solution to stop spammers form hitting our contact forms. It worked extremely well, and I started using it in WordPress as a hack at first. I thought it might be helpful to others, as I know a LOT of people are plagued by comment spam, even with Akismet, so I created the plugin.

Hopefully others can benefit from it, and be able to blog in peace.

 

Will this plug-in coexist nicely with Akismet? Or is it one or the other?

 

So nice of you to share your own work! Looking forward to trying this plug in.
Thanks,
Patch

Hold up, I keep getting a 403 Forbidden when I try to access this plugin??
any help here?
Patch

 

Hey Minstrel. It co-exists very well with Akismet (and other plugins). In fact I recommend using it together with Akismet. This plugin will stop the vast majority of spam, and you won’t even see it in your Akismet queue, but there will a few pingback and trackback spams (which this plugin is not designed to stop since they never hit the comments page) that Akismet does a nice job of catching.

 

Hey Patch...PM me your IP address...you may have triggered a security measure.

 

Installed. Thanks.

 

You're welcome!

 

Hi,

Nice idea.

Do you find your plugin more effective than Bad Behavior?

Thanks.

Rich

 

You're welcome! I know what you mean...Spam gets extremely frustrating and wastes alot of time.

Thanks Rich. I do find that WP-SpamFree is more effective than Bad Behavior. Bad behavior is often described as a plugin for stopping spam, but it's actually designed primarily to stop bad bots from accessing your site at all, for security etc, and blocking spam is a side-benefit. In concept it's great but there's a couple serious flaws in it that became apparent a couple months ago. 1) It doesn't properly validate search engine spiders and can potentially block them. 2) Two is that if Bad Behavior goes down, or its connection to its server, it can take down your whole blog. Because of this we stopped using it on all blogs we manage a couple months ago. 3) It takes alot of server resources. But even so, you can use them together if you like. Two blog posts you'll want to read on Bad Behavior:

• Bad Behavior Behaving Badly
• Bad Behavior Needs Behavior Modification

The author of the second article, IncrediBILL, will be releasing a bot blocker called CrawlWall that will blow away Bad Behavior, so keep your eyes out for it's release.

 

ehha good one

thanks for sharing with us.

 

This plug-in seems to work well. I've only had it installed for three days but so far I've had no spam to delete that wasn't already caught by Akismet.

Well done.

 

Hi,

Thanks for the informative response.

I downloaded your plugin from wp-plugins.net (couldn't access your site), installed it, and turned off Bad Behavior. It should be interesting to see what happens, because I get a ton of bots. Thanks!

Rich

 

Hey Rich. No problem...glad to help. Sorry about the site access problem. We don't allow some programs to download files for security purposes. If you ever get blocked, please PM me your IP address and I can look into it.

Thanks minstrel. Awesome...that's what I like to hear!

 

I've had it up a few hours. So far, so good. Seems, so far, to be stopping spam that use to get through Bad Behavior. That spam used to be trapped by Akismet, but it doesn't look like it is getting even that far at this point. Should be interesting to watch.

Rich

 

Exactly right...the method used by this plugin stops it cold. As for the reduced spam in your Akismet queue...no more wasting time having to check for false positives.

 

That sounds so good, I'm gonna install it in my blog soon.

I'm gonna miss checking my Akismet queue daily for spams.. and gonna miss reading those "Your post at [blogtitle] > [posttitle] is really interesting, but I still don't get it" spams lol

 

Actually, now that you mention it, when I checked this morning, not only was there no spam in the moderation queue - there was no spam awaiting deletion in Akismet either. I hadn't thought of this as taking some of the load of Akismet.

Bonus!