Due to the insane amount of spambots sending comments to my site lately I have decided to fight back. Therefore I have installed the WP-Spamfree plugin which I think is one of the most formidable anti-spam plugins.
Without the hassle of trying to guess words on hard to read images to fill them in this plugin uses a combination of java-script and cookies to determine weither you are a spam bot or not.
Let’s see how it works!
I use Akismet on my blog but that still gave me a lot of work behind the scenes. I later added that you have to have JavaScript enabled to be able to comment. That was two years ago and still not a single spambot seems to supports JavaScript. It will eventually happen but for the time being it’s a very simple solution.
Yeah, I have Akismet as well but even so I still have to go through the posts in order to weed out the false positives and generally just keep an eye on things. Now with the requirement of JavaScript and setting a cookie in the browser I have so far not received a single spam, the days before I received over a hundred a day generally from various bot nets it seems because the IP addresses where changing every 5 spams or so, sometimes faster than this.
I first made a hack to change the PHP file for posting comments to include a JavaScript activation but that was a kludgy 5-min hack I did and I was not happy with it. Then I found this plugin that I have enabled and it does the trick really really well!
And the best part is that it does not require the users to enter text from any of those hard-to-read pictures that many other sites uses. And I can tolerate the occasional spam, it’s just that when I get hundreds a day it gets really tedious and that seems to have stopped now. I really recommend the WP-Spamfree plugin, it works as a charm!