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?

The emergence of WordPress Cloning Software recently has piqued my interest, and I’ve tested a couple of the frontrunners so far, EZ WP Cloner Plugin and WPTwin. You can see the results for yourself on those posts.

Why would you want to clone a WordPress blog? One obvious reason would be to have a fully functional duplicate of your blog for back-up. Located on a different domain and webhosting service, it could sit there until needed, like if a mishap were to befall the original. While hosting services and WordPress itself have back-up capabilities, creating one of a complete WordPress blog, with all its intricate scripts, plus all of your add-ons, plugins, files, etc. is a daunting chore. Then there’s the database, which requires additional complicated steps.

With cloning technology it’s relatively easy to do everything in a few steps. With one or more clones of your blog sitting on other servers, if something awful were to happen to your original, in theory it should be a simple matter of installing a new WP blog there, then cloning one of the clones back to it. Alternatively, you could change the DNS of your domain to point to the cloned blog.

But I think WordPress cloning software has greater potential in a slightly different way.

Let’s say you found the perfect WP theme. Perhaps you’ve used a software program like Artisteer to create something totally unique to you, or paid to have a custom theme created for you. You’ve taken all the time needed to install, activate and configure several, even numerous, plugins and done other customizations. You’ve created it to be a recognizable “brand” – to uniquely represent you or your company.

You want to take everything with you as you set up new blogs around the internet, but you can’t. With each new WP installation, you have to do it all over again. You’ve got the theme and the plugins, but they all have to be re-uploaded, re-installed, re-activated and re-configured – every time.

WordPress cloning software could be used to let you set up just one “skeleton” blog, with everything installed and configured, including all elements, pages, logos, images and everything you want to be common to all your blogs. Then you could just clone that skeleton, in full working order, to wherever you want, as many times as you need. The only thing left to do with each new blog is start adding your content.

I haven’t tried this yet, but my little gray cells are jumping around excitedly in my brain pan.