Reduce Comment Spam To Zero Without Akismet

My blog used to get around 100-300 spam comments/trackbacks a day while Akismet was doing a great job, but as time went by it became very tedious to go through the comment/trackback spam to make sure no legitimate comments were caught. Using a combination of three WordPress plugins and without the help of Akismet I have managed to reduce the comment spam to almost zero. I am also listing a few other plugins.

Plugins for Comment Spam.

Simple Spam Filter for WordPress.

Get Simple Spam Filter from here. Most of the spam caught by Akismet is pretty obvious spam i.e.

• Contains 5 or more links to external sites
• Contains nothing but links
• Contains [url=http://www.example.com]example[/url] style links (my blog does not support bbcode style links)
• Contains a word that matches a short list of common spam words (for example, viagra or cialis). See the plugin’s source for the full list.

Simple Spam Filter helps you combat this kind of obvious spam. Its has a setting page where you can tweak it to suit your likings.

WordPress Comment Spam Stopper.

This a very simple Plugin that asks a very simple question that bots are too stupid to answer. I have found it even more effective if you change the default question. Get this plugin from here.

Comment-Policy WordPress Plugin

This is a alternative to Comment Spam Stopper. Instead of asking the users to enter an answer, you ask the user to agree to your comment policy by having a required field CheckBox. Since its JavaScript based most bots won’t see it. Get the plugin from here.

Plugins for Trackback Spam.

Extended Comments Options for WordPress.

While most of the plugins above will take care of comment spam. I found that I was getting tons of Trackback spam, since Trackbacks are not validated by WordPress. Using this plugin you can disable TrackBacks or Comments for your older posts. I have disabled trackbacks for posts older than a month. You can get this plugin here.

Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

If you don’t like the idea of disabling trackbacks for your older posts you can use this plugin to validate trackbacks.

1. checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to.
   This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
2. retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesn’t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.

You can get the plugin from here.

Antispam Collateral Condolences.

The last plugin does not combat spam but notifies a commenter in case his/her comment is caught in the spam queue or moderation. I highly recommend this plugin get it from here.