Blocking Comment Spam On WordPress
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been quietly testing a WordPress plugin that claims to block comment spam.
Background
I’ve always used the Akismet plugin that is included in WordPress installations. It does a good job of separating spam from legitimate comments. The problem, though, is that, depending on your settings, it usually dumps suspected spam into the moderation area, leaving you to manually sort through them to determine if they actually are spam. I wanted a way to stop the spam from being posted in the first place.
A few months back while searching through the WordPress plugins pages, I found SI Captcha and installed it. From that point on, I received virtually no spam comments – perhaps an average of 1 or 2 a week. I was very happy with SI Captcha until a couple of weeks ago when I read an article about how Captcha and other human verification devices (question/answer, puzzle) often deterred people from commenting at all because of the inconvenience.
I began to wonder if people were hesitant, or even unable, to comment here because of that. So I searched for an alternative spam prevention method.
WP-SpamFree
I found WP-SpamFree, another WordPress plugin that claimed to prevent spam almost entirely without Captcha. The author claimed the plugin uses Javascript and/or cookies to do the job. I’m not very knowledgeable in those subjects, but it sounded good. I installed and activated it, and tweaked the settings as suggested on the settings panel. As recommended, I turned off (deactivated) SI Captcha and let the WP-SpamFree plugin do its thing.
Results
Over the past 14 days, I have averaged 8 – 10 spam comments per day. That’s up from the 1 – 2 per week I averaged with SI Captcha. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. I will say, however, that I cannot empirically conclude that the fault lies entirely with the plugin. It could well be that I couldn’t come up with the correct combination of settings, and as a result it just didn’t work for me.
A Question For You
Does the use of a Captcha security, such as the SI Captcha I use here, discourage or prevent you from commenting on, or even registering for, this or any other website?
Tagged with: block comment spam • blog • captcha • comment spam • plugins • security • si captcha • wordpress • wp-spamfree
Filed under: Blocking Comment Spam • Wordpress Plugins
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Well, it does not discourage me.
Even the opposite, I usually do not try to comment where I do not see captchas because Akismet, I dunno why, but I am frequently dumped by Akismet even if I do not include any URL and always when I include URL or some technical terms.
It is discouraging when I do not see my submission immediately since I am not sure that it will be found and retrieved in tons of spam. And this also happens
Though, I personally use more funny KeyCAPTCHA that attracts vistors instead of deterring them:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/keycaptcha/
Hey CaptchaSmith!
Thanks for your comment – interesting! I think I’ll go checkout KeyCaptcha and put it up on a test blog to see how it looks and works.
Yeah, Akismet can be a little fussy sometimes. But I’ve found that most of the comments that get trapped actually are garbage. I always review manually, though.
KeyCAPTCHA does not collect visitors’ private information.
The author of the groundless accusations is a technically illiterate person.
Everyone can be convinced of his illiteracy by using FireBug or any other tools which show all outgoing traffic from a browser. KeyCAPTCHA sends just data which are required for CAPTCHA validation process. And it will never be changed.
By now our service doesn’t have any financial problems. That is why we are changing the TOS of our paid service “Personolized CAPTCHA” without rush. We are going to launch our “Personolized CAPTCHA” in July. And we won’t close our free standard KeyCAPTCHA service.
Looks like that these groundless accusations are planned competitors’ action against KeyCAPTCHA becausee these groundless accusations have been submitted to a few other websites. They used just two nicknames and conducted their action in one day.
If you find groundless accusations like these please contact us via KeyCAPTCHA website
Uninstalled KEYCAPTCHA becasue imediately after its installing I’ve got tons of bot spam passed thru it.
Besides my Email with which I registered in keycaptcha.com site (and used only for this registration) waqs flooded by spam
Dear Visitors,
The person spreading a slander and a lie regarding the KeyCAPTCHA Service uses different nicknames on different web resources.
He thinks up his new slander and lie from time to time.
You can find it out by googling “KeyCAPTCHA is under attack” (quoted).
This person extorted money from our employee. And he had been caught by the police when he was taking the money.
This person alleges that he had been our employee. But it is the lie.
We are not going to conceal that he assisted us in supporting our twitter account.
But after the numerous reprimands regarding the quality of his messages on our twitter, we had fulfilled all our obligations to this person and renounced his assistance.
But he has never been an employee of our company.
We just had a verbal agreement with this person.
Here are a couple of facts regarding his slander:
The Twitter support team had blocked his 3 accounts of his slander and lie on the KeyCAPTCHA Service right after our request and his 2 accounts without our requests.
Scam.com support team has blocked his 2 accounts of the same lie.
We would appreciate if you send us URLs of pages with his slander and without this reply.
To do it please, use http://hidemail.at/xihp2h
We are not going to reply to his future messages on this website. It is not our goal.
We just wanted to publish the facts regarding this person.
Please be careful when reading information from this person.
Our service and company are absolutely legal.
Here are the variants of using KeyCAPTCHA:
1. You earn money by using KeyCAPTCHA. In this case, we pay you for ads in KeyCAPTCHA on your website.
2. You pay us for personal CAPTCHAs. In this case, you can use your own images to create your own CAPTCHAs (containing your or third-party advertisement or without any ads) which will be displayed on your websites.
3. Combination of 1 and 2.
4. Free KeyCAPTCHA. In this case, you don’t earn money, and you don’t pay us. If you choose this way, we will display our standard CAPTCHAs (without any ads) on your websites.
We appreciate your understanding and sorry for the inconvenience,
KeyCAPTCHA Team
KeyCAPTCHA cheats customers in order to avoid the promised payout
If you change for free option without advertising, it sneakily feeds advertising to visitors that an owner of the protected webbsite doesn’t even see!!!
Dunno how KeyCAPTCHA manages to suppress negative feedbacks that disappear