I run WordPress on most of my websites because it's a nice quick install and easy to modify. I usually don't have problems with comment spam because I just dissable comments and forget about it. Now, the problem. One of my websites, the one I like most, has comments enabled. I use Akismet and a pretty extensive list of spam black-list words to catch the spam. The spam still keeps coming... so I also added an anti-spam "simple math question" to my comment forms. I also modified my htaccess file to reject submissions without referal addresses. I've done everything I can think of! The spam still keeps coming! Sometimes 1000 spam comments per day! Akismet and the black-list get most of it but a handful slips by... IS THERE ANY WAY TO STOP THE SPAM FROM EVEN BEING SUBMITTED??? I feel like I've done everything and nothing is working. Pete.
You need to install an image captcha (do a Google search for CAPTCHA), also, I would try installing Spam Karma as well. That should do the trick. No matter what you do, there may always be a small amount of spam.
Thanks, I will try it. A small amount of spam is ok, but when I get 1000 per day, it's too much... even 200-300 is too much.
Both Captcha and a simple drop down menu for answering yes or no to a question did wonders in my forum.
I use Akismet and it does a good job at catching spam, but not preventing it. I've had instances where real comments were flagged as spam by Akismet and normally it's not a problem to manually flag them as ok, but when you have several hundred spam comments to delete, the real ones get deleted also. I'm not really prepared to sift through hundreds of comments to find the good ones... EVERY DAY. That's why I'm looking for something to reduce the number of submissions. I think I will go with the Captcha since everything else has failed.
change the name of the page to submit comments from wp-comment.php to just about anything else. you need to do some hacking to get things working but it will stop much of the traffic. Spammers send comments to the wp-comment.php by default so If you use another file some will miss you.