If you have a WordPress blog, you may have experienced comment “spam” from time-to-time. You know which ones I mean… left by a company name, their comment looks generic or irrelevant, and they are just after a link to their website.
In the fight against these, Akismet has been a long time leader in anti-spam WordPress plugins. However since Akismet is no longer free, we thought to investigate some other options out there, to see if they are just as good.
The feedback on some alternative plugins has been great. So feel free to check out these options, that almost makes coughing up money for Akismet unnecessary:
Growmap’s Anti Spambot (GASP)
This plugin will add a client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer. It is a lot less trouble to click a box than it is to enter a captcha and because the box is genereated via client side javascript that bots cannot see, it should stop 99% of all automated spam bots.
Anti-Capture
When a comment is posted without a valid Anti-Captcha token, it shall be instantly marked as spam. This way, you can always manually approve this comment in hindsight if it appeared to be sincere.
Defensio
Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your users. In addition to simple spam filtering, we also provide world-class malicious content detection, profanity filtering, URL categorization, script detection and much more.
Advanced features such as support for OpenID, detailed statistics, charts and counter widget are also available.
Bad Behavior
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.
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.
AVH First Defense Against Spam
The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served by identifying them at the Project Honey Pot, a local blacklist or the local IP cache. Visitors trying to post a comment are checked at stopforumspam.com. Stop Forum Spam is not used to check before content is served due to the amount of requests, which overloads their infrastructure.
In Summary
As we make ourselves more and more difficult to sell to, so will spammers try harder to get to us, in the vain hope we approve their comment or even visit their website and make a purchase.
It obviously works or they would have given up by now.
What do you think? Is spam reducing? Increasing? Or about the same? What tool or plugin do you use to combat the barrage?
Feel free to share your thoughts below.
Twitter: danieljohnsonjr
May 19, 2011 at 9:18 pm | Permalink
I’ve got Akismet and Bad Behavior on all my WordPress installations. I’ve also been using the Disqus comment system. Nice to know some free alternatives to Akismet out there! Thanks, Fiona!
Daniel´s last [type] ..Seeing content differently
Twitter: fionamceachran
May 21, 2011 at 3:34 pm | Permalink
@Daniel, Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your comment, and your feedback on the anti-spam plugins that you use. I didn’t think to use 2 at once, but I guess it is a good idea, especially if you have a site that spammers especially like
Akismet has always had paid options and free options. It continues to be free for personal blogs.
Twitter: fionamceachran
May 21, 2011 at 3:47 pm | Permalink
@Pete, Hi Pete
Thanks for that. Yes I should have mentioned that you can get Akismet for free still on just a personal blog. But since our customers are all businesses, I wanted to offer some alternatives just for them.
Twitter: reguligence
May 20, 2011 at 3:39 pm | Permalink
Fiona,
thank you for sharing this information.
I feel disturbed by getting so many spam comments, which Akismet fails to eliminate.
I had seen the GASP plugin on others’ blogs, but did not know its name and hence could not find it, though I was desperately searching for it…
Now that I have installed it I am curious as to whether it will provide for some relief.
BR,
Emil
Emil A. Georgiev´s last [type] ..Who Wants To Dam Online Streaming
Twitter: fionamceachran
May 21, 2011 at 3:53 pm | Permalink
@Emil A. Georgiev, Hi Emil,
I’m sorry to hear you have been the target of spammers, and I appreciate your feedback on Akismet.
Yes, I had heard of GASP before too, and I heard it was quite good. Especially since it is from the creators of “commentluv”, which I think is excellent.
I look forward to hearing how it works out for you
Twitter: reguligence
May 21, 2011 at 6:06 pm | Permalink
@Fiona McEachran,
I have been using it for a day and a half and can confirm that what you write is true: since installation spam has decreased by 99% -)!
Thanks once again!
BR,
Emil
Emil A. Georgiev´s last [type] ..Apple’s Appstore Or Tradmarking Descriptiveness
Spam is always annoying. Thanks for sharing this valuable knowledge, Fiona. I am recently using Askimet but it doesn’t work well. I will use another alternative. Bad Behavious sounds good for me. Cheers.
Andrew Walker´s last [type] ..Omnis Coupons
Twitter: qubenzis
December 28, 2011 at 10:04 pm | Permalink
Nice list you’ve got here. As I’m shopping for an alternative to Akismet that lately been giving me warnings like “14 comments temporarily held for moderation and will be automatically re-checked in 237 days”. I suspect that many legitimate comments have been lost due to Akismet.over-doing it.
For you guys who are webmastering your own server I also recommend www[.]spider-trap[.]de that uses a simple .htaccss trap to ban IP’s from scanning your site with malicious spider-bots (among them are the bots that plant the spam). Cheers and thx – Ronan
I have combined Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin and bad behavior. I hope that they will not work against each other?
Nice work!
GASP & CAPTCHA are very useful
Bye, spam!! XD