Are you a blogger? Are you tired of getting spam in your comments?

You should have realised that most of these spam are made by bots (automated scripts). If you have already installed and activated the "Akismet" plug-in, you’ll realise that it is just not enough.

Akismet will catch all comments that look "fishy", a la Spam Assassin (a popular anti spam email software). However, you still need to check what have been caught by Akismet every now and then to make sure that they really are, spam. On a daily basis, I get these 30-40 spam comments that are caught by Akismet, and I have to view them briefly to make sure that they really are spam, and not a genuine comment from my readers.

I was a "newbie" once… comments that sound like "Hi, I’ve read this post but I don’t really understand it" (for example, on my post about LunarPages webhosting back in November 2007), or "Your post about [BlogTitle] sounds interesting, blah2", got me excited. I thought they were genuine comments. I even replied to them on the email, trying to be nice and get to know more about my readers.

After getting the same comments from different readers then I realised, that they were spam! The remaining question is, if you get a comment such as:
"Hey man, thanks very much for your post! It helps me a lot" - is this considered a SPAM? Or is it a genuine appreciation from your  reader?

WP-SpamFree

Most of the automated comments are made by bots, as explained in my introduction. Now, what if you can block those bots without having to do anything? Sounds great? That’s how WP-SpamFree works.

From the plug-in site:

How It Works
Most of the spam hitting your blog originates from bots. Few bots can process JavaScript. Few bots can process cookies. Fewer still, can handle both. This plug-in uses a combo of JavaScript and cookies, since most bots choke on them, to weed out the humans from bots, preventing 99% of automated spam from ever getting to your site.

In simpler words, it will stop bots from commenting on your posts through some JavaScript and Cookies mumbo jumbo behind the scene (you don’t even need to know!) As a result of this, though, your reader has to turn on their JavaScript and Cookies in their browsers to comment on your posts (which most them are already turned on anyways)

WP-SpamFree is not an alternative to Akismet. In fact, this plug-in is best to be used alongside with the Akismet plug-in. All comments will be filtered first by WP-SpamFree (blocking all automated comments), and all non-automated comments will be filtered by Akismet!

After activating this plug-in, my spam comments has turned from 30-40 a day to 2-3 spam a day! What a difference!

I’d strongly suggest you to install this plug-in and see the result yourself! Download the plug-in on the Author’s site here.

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