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4 Great Plugins For Controlling Spam On Your WordPress Blog

By on July 5, 2010 in WordPress

If you’ve been run­ning a blog with even a mod­er­ate amount of traf­fic, you know that one of the biggest annoy­ances that come with it is spam. Whether is comes in com­ments, trackbacks/​pingbacks or fake bot sub­scrip­tions, deal­ing with it can eat up a siz­able amount of your pre­cious time.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. If your blog is pow­ered by WordPress, there are sev­eral plu­g­ins that you can down­load for free that will vir­tu­ally elim­i­nate all spam. They also make it very easy to deal with what they’re not sure about by putting them in the mod­er­a­tion queue.

So, here are 4 of the best WordPress plu­g­ins I have found for con­trol­ling spam. I have all 4 acti­vated in all my WordPress blogs or those I installed for oth­ers. They all work dif­fer­ently or tar­get dif­fer­ent types of spam.

  1. Akismet (com­ment spam): This one is obvi­ous as it come pre-​installed with WordPress. You should def­i­nitely get an Akismet API key and acti­vate it. If you run a per­sonal or hobby site, the licence and key are free. You can find out how Akismet dif­fer­en­ti­ates between a per­sonal and a com­mer­cial licence that you need to pay monthly for here: http://​akismet​.com/​c​o​m​m​e​r​c​i​al/ Akismet dis­plays the num­ber of com­ments spam it has blocked on the WordPress admin dash­board. No need to down­load as it is installed with WordPress by default (but not activated).
  2. WP-​SpamFree (com­ment spam): As great as Akismet is, it will not catch all com­ment spam, no sin­gle plu­gin can. That’s why I run WP-​SpamFree along­side Akismet on all my WordPress installs. In terms of num­bers, it catches an order of mag­ni­tude more spam than Akismet. WP-​SpamFree also dis­plays its blocked spam com­ments num­bers on the dash­board.
    Download WP-​SpamFree
  3. Sabre (reg­is­tra­tion spam): This is a more insid­i­ous kind of spam but, if your blog is set to let vis­i­tors reg­is­ter freely (with­out need­ing your approval), you will need to get this kind of spam under con­trol as well. Sabre gives you sev­eral choices of obtru­sive (like captchas) and unob­tru­sive (like speed of reg­is­tra­tion) tests you can choose from to deter­mine if a reg­is­tra­tion attempt is from a spam­mer bot or a real human. It is a very flex­i­ble plu­gin and it also dis­plays its num­bers on the dash­board.
    Download Sabre
  4. Simple Trackback Validation (trackbacks/​pingbacks): Trackback spam can be one of the most annoy­ing to deal with and that is why many blogs turn them off (that’s what I did on the pre WordPress ver­sions of my blog). But to me, they are a great way to link between blogs and show your appre­ci­a­tion for other people’s writ­ing. I want to keep track­backs enabled so I install this plu­gin to deal with the spam. Unlike the oth­ers, it doesn’t show its num­bers on the dash­board but you can enable a log­ging option and the lat­est 50 track­backs it con­sid­ered spam will be listed at the bot­tom of its set­tings page. Any track­back it’s not sure about it will move to the reg­u­lar com­ment mod­er­a­tion queue.
    Download Simple Trackback Validation

As you can see, you can have a fully func­tional blog, get com­ments, track­backs and sub­scribers to have a real con­ver­sa­tion with your read­er­ship and keep spam at bay. Try the above plu­g­ins and share your thoughts about them here. If you know of oth­ers that you con­sider bet­ter, post a com­ment say­ing so.

Happy spam-​free blogging!

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6 Responses to 4 Great Plugins For Controlling Spam On Your WordPress Blog

  1. Chris Cavalluci July 5, 2010 at 9:16 am #

    I just installed Discus Comments on my site. Do you think this plu­gin will help reduce spam issues, too?

    Reply
  2. Stéphane July 5, 2010 at 9:36 am #

    I doubt it as I think the pro­cess­ing of com­ments is han­dled entirely on the Disqus server and not by WordPress itself. Akismet and WP-​Spamfree prob­a­bly never see the com­ments at all. If they do, they should cer­tainly catch any spam.

    Any par­tic­u­lar rea­son you went with Disqus?

    Reply
  3. Chris Cavalluci July 6, 2010 at 5:27 pm #

    I went with Discus because it’s inte­grated with other social plat­forms. It seemed very easy to imple­ment — plu­gin instal­la­tion and account setup was very straight-​forward. I didn’t even think of it as an anti-​spam com­po­nent until I read your article.

    Reply
  4. Allan Joseph February 14, 2011 at 5:06 pm #

    Askimet is good enough, all you need to do is just mod­er­ate the com­ments first before they are posted on the topic. Or if not you can have a captcha plu­gin. Sometimes hav­ing a lot of anti spam­ming plu­g­ins just rejects everything.

    Reply
  5. Kathy Frazar September 28, 2011 at 5:18 pm #

    Hi Stéphane. I’ve been curi­ous about which of the above WordPress plu­g­ins have the high­est suc­cess rate of reducing/​eliminating spam. Do you know any sta­tis­tics on this info? I want to use one of the plu­g­ins, but haven’t decided which one yet. Thanks for shar­ing your expertise.

    Reply
  6. Stéphane September 30, 2011 at 12:28 pm #

    Hi Kathy,

    Akismet is def­i­nitely the main one. It works great for human spam but is less effec­tive with machine gen­er­ated spam in my expe­ri­ence. The other plu­gin I now use in con­junc­tion with Akismet is FV Antispam. It’s VERY light on CPU and I see no spam and 0 false pos­i­tives. It replaced WP-​Spamfree for me which I no longer rec­om­mend. I’ve actu­ally stopped using Sabre and Simple Trackback Validation too on most projects and stick with Akismet and FV Antispam: http://​word​press​.org/​e​x​t​e​n​d​/​p​l​u​g​i​n​s​/​f​v​-​a​n​t​i​s​p​am/

    Thanks for your comment!

    Reply

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