Anyone have opinions on whether it's better to moderate comments or just use something like Akismet without moderation? I don't have much experience in how well Akismet or similar tools work at automatically filtering out spam comments, so would appreciate hearing from anyone who's had success using it. Jay
Askitmet will eliminate spam -- you still get to moderate legitimate comments -- my site has rcvd of 10,000 spam comments in the last 4 months -- self moderating would take forever
agree with john_nyc - manual moderating would be nigh on impossible once the spam starts flooding in. Along with Akismet, you should also have these two plugins as well: 1. Spam-Karma 2 - catches spam like Akismet 2. Bad Behaviour - stops spambots from injecting the comments. Akistmet/SK2 wouldn't even see the spam coming in. The plugin pages: SK2 - http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ Bad Behaviour - http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/
Just go with Akismet, doing it manually takes too much time. Sometimes askiment catches normal posts but if you click "mark not as spam" ,it will learn. Or thats what the readme says
Thanks for the replies! I was a bit leery of Bad Behavior, since it stops regular users now and then. Seems like you'd need a good amount of traffic to be able to afford losing the occasional real person. Jay
Don't worry about badbehavior. It is rare that normal users are stopped from commenting. Like mooiness said, I'd use this in conjunction with Aksimet and SpamKarma. It is like the spam killer concoction.
I think the best thing to go with is Akismet AND captcha images. Akismet does not mark all the spammy comments as spam and sometimes marks the valuable ones... I think no real user will you loose with a captcha image, since if someone has something to share it will not stop because he has to type a word from an image. It is pretty common on the web, everybody got used to it and none of the bots can cheat it.