New Weapon Against Comment Spam for WordPress

One day, no spam, no Akismet. Usually I have a hundred Akismet comments in queue and 150 blocked Bad Behavior sites.

So far, this is the best anti-spam I have used. Congratulations!

Now, to see, if the bots can break it, because we know that they will try. Are you prepared?

Rich

 

That's what we like to hear! Thanks for the compliment!

Regarding bots breaking it, it's pretty much a numbers game. There probably are an extremely small percentage (less than 1%) of bots that could potentially bypass this (or any system). The thing is, the number of hackers with the skills to create something like that are extremely small and those high-skill hackers earn their pay doing much more heinous things. The vast majority of bots out there are relatively simple and are created by hacker/spammers with relative low skill. It's not too hard to knock these out right away. The key isn't whether we can eliminate every single spambot out there, but can we make a HUGE difference for most people's blogging experience, and the answer is YES! However, that being said, I've got things in the works for future versions that should make it almost impossible for bots to break! Heh, heh. As bots evolve, so will WP-SpamFree.

 

So I guess we don't even need Akismet to be installed in the system? Should we remove it?

 

Well congratulations again for a job well done. And if you need a reference, tell them Links.com sent ya!

Thanks again for a great plugin.

Rich

 

Ain't it grand?

I think Akismet is still handy for a couple reasons. WP-SpamFree was designed for one specific purpose: To knock out the brute quantities of comment spam generated by bots. It isn't designed to attack human comment spam, or trackback and pingback spam (which altogether make up a small percentage of blog spam). Akismet can handle what's leftover from WP-SpamFree (which isn't much) quite nicely. Akismet struggles when it has mass quantities to try and judge, but with just a few, it's fine, so it's a good combo.

Thanks! You're very welcome!

FYI, there was a new release today - v1.3.1 has a bugfix. One of the upgrades I made in v1.3 inadvertently disabled the reception of pingbacks and trackbacks altogether. 1.3.1 fixed that. (Some of you may prefer not to have trackbacks and pingbacks - if so, keep 1.3 installed.)

If you guys find WP-SpamFree helpful, please vote for it on WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spamfree/ - At the bottom of the page you can rate it by giving it 1-5 stars. 5 would be awesome, but only if you feel like it.

 

nice idea, if it is working that fine. i think i am going to give it a try
thanks alot for your idea

 

Thanks for posting this, I'll be installing it today.

 

It's funny that 1-3 spams can still go through (I usually have 30-40 a day though). Does this mean it's being inserted manually by human readers? (copy pasting into the comment field)

 

Either that or it's trackback spam. Trackback spam can look exactly like a Normal comment, but it comes in through a different method in WordPress. You can tell if you go into Akismet (if it's a recent version) and it's on the trackback page.

 

Thanks for the work you've done on this. I am installing it on a couple of my blogs now. I'm very new to blogging, but spam is already a real problem.

You haven't mentioned, so let me be the first to ask (at least here): Will this plug-in work on WordPress MU when installed in the mu-plugins directory? I notice you do have a support sub-tab in the plugins tab of the control panel, but it is only informational and doesn't offer any addition configuration or functionality. So, it would be great if it worked straight from the mu-plugins folder so I don't have to worry about member bloggers that struggle enough with using the blog as it is.

Thanks again,

Jim

 

Done. 5 stars. Actually, I didn't realize those ratings even existed - it wouldn't hurt to make them a little more prominent.

It's now 5 days after installation of WP-SpamFree and this is what I'm looking at:

Usually, there are several hundred in there split between the two queues.

 

Thanks! buddy i think will really help us to get rid of SPAMMERS

 

Done. 5 stars with a big thumbs up comment. Congratulations and good luck!

Rich

 

So far this has blocked all the spam bots, I love it!

Usually I'll see hundreds of spam comments and a few spam trackbacks, now it is 0 spam comments and a few trackbacks. (which Akismet catches anyway so it's all good)

 

You're welcome! We haven't tested it yet on WordPress MU, but it shouldn't function any differently. We will start running some tests on it though, as that's a great point. I believe it will work just like you want it to. If you do test it out, please let me know any feedback so I can keep making it better.

@minstrel,jezzz,richrf,mtbiker:
Thanks for the positive feedback, votes, and comments! That's what I like to hear...that spambots are getting kicked in the head, Bruce Lee style!

 

Nice, I will try that since never managed to get a key for askimet

 

I did install it in the mu-plugins folder, but I have no idea how to test it. There is no "informational" tab in the plugins tab of either the administrative site or the member blogs. The site is very new, so there hasn't been a lot of action, even from spammers, although one member blog (my own) has received a few spam comments that I deleted. Not even the Akismet plugin, which is also in the mu-plugins folder caught them. I wonder if I even have the system set up correctly?

Jim

 

If you can activate it on the plugins page it should work. You can check if it's activated by viewing the source of your blog page and searching for this:

<!-- WP-SpamFree v1.3.1 JS Code :: BEGIN -->

Code (markup):

If that's in there, it means the plugin is activated and working properly. If you'd like me to check it out, feel free to PM me the url of your site and I'll take a look.

 

Will you get a negative-positive kind of result; e.g. mistaken a genuine comment as a spam?

 

The way this one works, you can't get false positives.