Anyone who has a popular blog has undoubtedly noticed that it tends to attract spammers like Paris Hilton attracts paparazzi. Spam entries can make your job more difficult in a number of ways. The primary way that it complicates your online life is that it wastes your time on a consistent basis. These spam entries can also distract your users from your website, make you seem less professional, and take up more bandwidth than is necessary. Luckily, there are some simple plugins that you can use to get rid of that spam or better yet, prevent it. Here are the three best anti-spam plugins.
Akismet
Akismet is the single largest spam destroying plugin designed for WordPress. This plugin will take a good hard look at the usual places where spammers visit and leave their droppings, including your comments, trackbacks, and more. When a comment is left, Akismet takes it through the ringer, testing it for common indicators of spam content. In the end, though, it simply gives you a thumbs or a thumbs down answer. If it is declared spam, it’s kept on the server for you to review in case you feel non-spam entries may be getting blocked, and is automatically discarded for you after 15 days.
Akismet is entirely free of charge for anyone running a personal blog on their desktops or laptops. The creators of this plugin sell commercial licenses for anyone who’s making substantial amounts of money from blogging.
Conditional CAPTCHA
Conditional CAPTCHA is designed to work in cooperation with Akismet, addressing the one major weakness of the Akismet plugin. There has been a tendency for Akismet to block non-spam entries as if they were spam. This results in webmasters and bloggers having to take the time to filter through the entries marked as spam, approving anything that seems appropriate. Conditional CAPTCHA adds a “CAPTCHA code” phase to the Akismet run sequence.
If a comment is left that is declared spam, the commenter will be asked to fill in this code. If they fail, their entry will automatically be deleted. If they succeed, you can either set Conditional CAPTCHA to approve that entry for you, or send it to your spam queue, so you can double check the content. Conditional CAPTCHA is also compatible with TypePad AntiSpam.
Defensio Anti-Spam
Defensio is one of the only real competitors with Akismet, providing a strong anti-spam filter that comes along with its own set of attractive features. One major area in which it fills a niche is the support it provides for options like OpenID comments and RSS trackbacks. Defensio also provides excellent statistics and tracking for you. The plugin is well qualified to wear the title “adapting software,” as it learns from your behaviors and the comments you accept to provide you with the results that you want. The fact that it is incompatible with other spam filters like Akismet makes it an all or nothing deal, but if you decide to go for it, you’re not likely to be disappointed by the results you get.