Usually Spammers don’t have enough time to manually spam a blog, so they hire robot to do the nasty job. And to prevent them, we use tools like Akismet or Spama Karma.
They effectively block spams, but at the same time they kill good comments as well. Ofcource, you can verify the spambox before hitting the delete button, but sometimes it becomes nearly impossible to verifying each one of them.
They only way to kill these robotic spams is to install Captcha (Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
While there are tons of Wordpress Plugin which does the job, I use only Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin because its neat and high customizable.
Installation:
Installation is fairly simple, just download the plugin, upload it inside your plugin directory and then activate the plugin through your Wordpress Admin Panel.
This will automatically insert a captcha above your comments form, but if you want to manually insert the captcha code in your template or change the configuration, you’ll need to edit custom_anti_spam.php. Don’t worry, it isn’t that hard, you’ll find all the details with the file itself.
Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Plugin
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wrote, on November 13th, 2006
very stylish and trendy.
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
Good. I do not have my blog that popular yet, and I believe once that happens, I will start to get hit by spam. Then I think, I will have to go for Captcha.
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
You just made your site inaccessible !!!
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
Thanx for that tip and the plugin dude. I implemented that in the blog already
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
@Ajay - i am unable to understand what you want to say. R u with or against using captcha. Please clear, because you know these things better.
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
And, you may want to take a look at http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/
wrote, on November 13th, 2006
Ajay: Atleast, its better than Akismet !!
wrote, on November 14th, 2006
Ajay: Nice Find, but not all spammers use these captcha decoders. Even If they do, I have Akismet working in the backend, just I case any spammer manages to get through, I’ll manually filter them
wrote, on November 14th, 2006
Not sure if it is a better. Has your spam reduced because of the Captcha?
Also, have you seen my article?
wrote, on November 16th, 2006
[...] Following Thilak’s results, I installed Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin for Wordpress to test. [...]
wrote, on November 29th, 2006
[...] Example of Wordpress plugin that using Captcha is Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Plugin. I never use this plugin, so I don’t know how it performs. But based on Thilak post, it seems like this plugin is really good. And from my understanding, Captcha can also be use to reduce the spams in your Akismet. [...]
wrote, on November 30th, 2006
Hey Thilak, what happens if the spammer are real persons indeed?
wrote, on November 30th, 2006
Hans: Then there is no way out, even Akismet fails to catch those comments. Maybe Hand Moderation should help (That’s what I do)
wrote, on December 1st, 2006
I’m testing a combination for the time being : both Akismet and Spam Karma 2 into 1. Sometimes good comments get caught up but I can recover them since I’ll be checking the list when I get online. I’m using this plugins that allow me to use both.
I was also using Bad Behavior but it had unrecoverable effects like denying people of even posting things or using my contact form. So I disabled it.
But as I said, I’m still testing the combinations that work best. If the current fails then CAPTCHA will have its turn.
How about you Thilak? How did you come to the conclusion of using CAPTCHA? Any personal experiences?
Thanks indeed buddy for the recommendation.
wrote, on December 1st, 2006
Hans: Earlier I used a combi of Akismet and Peter’s Antispam. but last night Antispam plugin stopped working for me