Every blogger whether he is a newbie or a pro blogger is flooded by Spam in various forms like trackbacks, comments etc. The amount of spam is so much that unless you dont have a automatic anti spam service in the form of plugins, you could waste your whole day to deal with these spam or you may delete the genuine comments too. Today we will talk about some of the best Antispam WordPress plugins which can block almost majority of Spam unless the spammer is human and is spamming manually.
1. Akismet
This is one of best antispam plugins developed by Automattic which works using a API key that can be obtained for free from WordPress.com. Even though, a small fee is applicable for Bloggers who earn more than $500 a month, its free for every blogger below that level. Dont worry, they don’t ask any information to verify this and you can get a free API key easily. Its Free for personal use.
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Majority of Bloggers use this plugin to tackle spam. If you are not sure of any other plugin, you can go for this blindly.
2. Bad Behavior
This plugin acts as a complement to your existing Anti Spam service like Akismet and it can work side by side with your existing plugin.
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
3. WP-reCAPTCHA
If you are comfortable with adding another level of restriction for your readers to make comments by entering a captcha, then this is a great plugin for you even though it may be a bit inconvenient to few of your readers if they want to make comments,
While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a ceratin percentage of users solve the ‘uknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word.
Because the industry level scanners and OCR software which are used to digitize the books can’t read the words with which the CAPTCHAs are constructed, it is safe to assume that in-house spam-bot OCR techniques will not be able to bypass the CAPTCHA either.
4. Antispam Bee
Its another great plugin which works by replacing your comment field completely and hence spam bots cant use the comments field to create Spam. For humans, nothing changes and hence it blocks almost every comment. It also lets you block comments and trackbacks from specific countries. In fact, I use this plugin on all my blogs and it works great.
- [NEW] Block comments and pings from specific countries
- WordPress 3.x ready: Design as well as technical
- Optional strict check for incomming comments
- Email notifications about new spam comments
- Trackback and pingback check
- Spam counter on dashboard
- Quick & Dirty: activate, set settings, done!
- Spam may be marked or deleted immediately
- Automatically cleanup the spam folder
- Saves no data in the database
- Accordingly no outgoing connection
- Very, very fast execution
- No need to adjust any templates
- Clean up after uninstall the plugin
- Anonymous and independen
5. WP-Hashcash
Another great antispam plugin to use on your wordpress blog.
WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on WordPress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot. If the javascript check fails, WP Hashcash now gives you three options; it can either put the comment into moderation (default), put the comment in the akismet queue, or delete it.
CONCLUSION
Every blogger should be using atleast one antispam plugin on his/her blog so that the blog remains clean. My recommendation, use Akismet or Antispambee. I avoid using captcha plugin as it may hamper many readers who want to comment on your blog.
Which plugins do you use for your WordPress blogs? Talk about them in comments.
