I noticed a Twitter topic started by Caitlin, and so I decided to post my updated impressions. Let me know if there is some ultimate plugin that totally melts spam faces, and I will try it out. Anyway, the big 3 that you usually see are:
- Akismet: Open-source purist arguments aside, Akismet is your best bet for spam protection. It will probably always be updated, and it does a great job of catching spammy trackbacks/pingbacks. However, it is far from perfect, and spam trickles through a few times a month. Akismet tends to catch legit comments too, although my false-positive rate did decrease with time. Akismet takes an aggregate, rather than an individualized (like SK2) approach to spam fighting.
- Spam Karma 2: First and foremost: the plugin author has dicontinued work on SK2. Basically, Dave got tired of constant WP updates, and the rage gave way to apathy. SK2 is now GPL, but as of this moment is not actively supported. It probably still works ok, and SS!AB used SK2 for a long time. It was great while it worked, but SK2 does a very poor job filtering spammy trackbacks/pingbacks.
- Bad Behavior: Bad Behavior is unique in that it is designed to work alongside other spam-fighting plugins. So while Akismet and SK2 don’t mix that well, BB works with either. We had BB for a while and I think it helped cut down on the spam I had to wade through. There was an incident where an old blacklist locked users out of their blogs, though I think that was a one-time thing. I have seen criticisms of the method used in BB, but it seems to do a decent job in a support role.
When it comes to spam-fighting plugins, you probably want to stick with a well-established brand. Spam-fighting is actually quite sophisticated, yet you will see tons of spam-plugins that require almost zero effort for spammers to bypass (and worse, they may stop your readers from commenting). I have also read some good things about wp-spamfree and Cookies for Comments (only blocks comment spam), but I have not used either plugin.
8 Comments
I dunno why but I have significantly less spam with Akismet these days. I used to get 1000+ spam comments a day now I barely get 100.
My spam comment count is quickly catching up to my actual comment count. On the bright side, that means my site is gaining visibility, I think.
Akismet catches all the spam but I’ve started getting more on a daily basis and it really ruins my tables. I’ll try out Bad Behaviour and see if help Akismet pick up the slack. Thanks so much! ^-^
I have all 3 and I still get a few spams a day. They go into Akismet, though.
Akismet does a great job of catching all my spam, but don’t like their table layout for checking/deleting the collected spams. That’s what I liked about SK2, you can tweak it to show all the spam comments so you can go through the whole list in one page =/ Yeah, I’m just lazy orz.
Wanting to spare myself the trouble of checking the spams is what prompted me to go WP-spamfree =.=;
I’ve got them all, though the occasional spam trackback slips through. Also to answer your query on twitter, I stuck to SK2 because it served my purpose, and just like the creator, I’ve not updated my WP ever since either.
Except that Hinano catches my legit comments!
I’m using Akismet and it catches all really spam comments. I have no problems with it.