Previously the site was running Spam Karma 2, and the somewhat redundant Akismet. While I think Akismet is a good idea, and it is nice to have a team behind an effort, I like Spam Karma 2 better. Spam Karma 2 gives me way more options, and is not subject to the poisoning of the well. I also don’t have to worry about my spam plugin’s server going down. One thing that concerned me about SK2 is the amount of space it took up in the database. This may have been kruft left over from previous editions, but there were nearly 27 Mb of data (like 5,000+ records) in the wp_sk2_spams table. I emptied the table, checked to make sure the plugin was still working, cleared the Akismet marked spam comments, and then disabled Akismet. Now the whole database is less than 7 Mb.
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
However, to pick up the slack, I installed Bad Behavior. I think these two plugins should work really well together, and so far in one and a half days, the plugin blocked about 530 requests. If you have any trouble getting your comment in, please let me know through the contact page.
One Comment
I’ve only been using WordPress for a couple of months but so far, I’ve not been let down by Akismet; in fact, its managed to block almost every SPAM comment received. But then, may be the real nasty bots have yet to spider me!
From my experience with these things, the best way to completely block them is to use a unique form of CAPTCHA. The bots have been generically coded to flood the Word Press system, so the moment you change the way it operates, they die. Of course, all this depends on whether or not you want to burden your commenters with a CAPTCHA field in the first place… Decisions decisions!