At the beginning of 2009, I noticed that this blog is getting more and more traffic from search engines such as Google who is giving me the highest. Currently, about 50% of my monthly blog traffic are from search engines. (Wuhuh!!! Hehehe…) Feels great actually but a problem also arises. Comment spams and trackbacks are also on the rise.

On a daily basis, I am deleting around 20 to 40 comments as spam (Grrrr…! Grrrr… and more Grrrr…!). It’s easy to delete them with just one click but I make it a point to be careful when I do that. I still check if some genuine comments are mistakenly tagged as spam so I would not delete them.

Getting rid of comment spam in Wordpress is not an old school thing. There are a number of free Wordpress plugins that were released over the years especially created to do the job automatically. These plugins are great but spammers are getting smarter so it’s always a good thing to update your plugin whenever available.

For those who are having the same problem as I am, I’ve listed here some of the most effective ways to fight comment spam in Wordpress:

1. Use Anti-Spam Plugins

a. Akismet - Probably the most popular and widely used plugin by Wordpress users to fight comment spam on their blogs or websites. I myself is using this plugin for this blog. It’s doing a good job but there are still times when spam bots are able to bypass its filters.

b. Mollom - This plugin uses the Akismet way of filtering and checking to see if a comment is a spam or not. What makes it different is that if it finds out that the comment is a spam, instead of sending it to the spam bin it prompts the user to solve a CAPTCHA which of course only a human can be solve. Clever isn’t it?

c. Antispam Bee - This one claims to be the best anti-spam plugin for Wordpress. The way it works is simple. It replaces the comment field by changing the ID parameters so spam bots won’t get a chance to sneak in to your blog.

d. WP-SpamFree - It works like a firewall to virtually eliminate automated comment spam from bots. This plugin uses a dynamic combo of JavaScript and cookies to weed out the humans from spambots, preventing 99%+ of automated spam from ever getting to your site.

e. Defensio - Claims to be an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behavior and those of you readers. If you plan to use this along with Akismet, it will cause a problem so you need to deactivate Akismet first if you wish to use Defensio instead.

f. NoSpamNX - This plugin is the successor of Yawasp. It works by adding extra fields (hidden before the “normal” user) automatically to your comment template. When a comment is saved, these fields are checked. For additional protection, the order and the values of these fields change periodically, so that no spambot can adapt to a specific blog adapt.

2. Automatically Close Comments on Your Old Articles

If you are using the Wordpress 2.7 version, you can do this by loging-in to your WP Admin area. Just go to Settings -> Discussion. Under the “Discussion Settings” and “Other comment settings”, click the “Automatically close comments on articles older than [ ] days”. Certainly a good way to fight comment spam without the need to install or modify anything but you might wanna think about those who still wanted to put genuine comment on them.

3. Comment Blacklisting

To do this, go to Settings -> Discussion and you will see a panel there called the Comment Blacklist. This is where you can put words, name, URL, e-mail, or IP you want to be blacklisted. Be careful what you add on your blacklist. If a comment matches something here it will be completely nuked and there will be no notification even if it is a genuine comment.

4. Try The Apache Tricks

I was surprised to learn about these tricks using Apache to fight comment spam on blogs. It includes editing the htaccess file and the wp-comments-post.php file. I’m afraid to try this one as I have little knowledge on Apache so if you guys have the courage to try them, you can visit Fight Blog Spam with Apache to give them a shot. Let us know how effective they are, ok.