With there being so many different ways to rid you self from comment spam. I figured I would suggest some ways to help reduce your spam. On Growmaps Post about Akismet, We were discussing some ways to help reduce spam in her comment moderation and I wanted to post about what I use to help reduce the bots from posting. Anyone can do this because of all the problems we are having with Akismet, I have disabled that on my blog and I haven’t looked back yet.

Having been working to minimize my spam intake.   I have talked about about some email spam problems in the past.  Although there are many reasons why you get spam, the main reason is for someone trying to make money from something they want you to buy or even install!!

As you can see that image I have up shows you the type of spam I get and you probably like me asking yourself why are they trying to leave those comments.   I think I know but this is to help those who might want to get rid of some of the most common comment spam.

• Bad Behavior Plugin — I am using this plugin with conjunction with my Project Honey Pot to help harvest those bad guys.   This little plugin works in conjunction with Project Honey Pot to determine if it is posting same comments from the same IP.  You will need http:BL API Key to get Bad Behavior to talk to each other.
• Project Honey Pot — You should understand, there are more than the API KEY.   I installed a few Honeypots on my server to help other content management systems administrators help collect data of possible comment spammers.  This helps others who are trying to fight spam see if there are other sites that this IP is commenting on!!  The more who sign up and install their own honeypots the better off the community is in the long run.
• WP-Recaptcha — Now this works with logins and Comments to help reduce the amount of possible bots.   Although it is somewhat harder for comments to be written by a true person.   This helps reduce bots but won’t reduce them to much.   You should also protect your Wp-admin subdirectory by using this to help detour scripts from dictionary attacking your password.
• WP-BAN –  This is proactive solution from just sitting back and doing nothing.   Here you can watch spam and figure out which IP’s are making the most comment spams and prevent them from even accessing your website.   This is great because this will alert the user who has an infected system that can’t access your site and to email the admin.   I haven’t had one of the banned IPS to send me email yet.   So either they don’t want to get on my blog or they are just bots.
• Comment Spamtrap — This is almost like Project Honey Pot but instead these are hidden to all real users and bots who fill in these forms are reading from HTML and not from the screen. If you fill in all the forms then you will be consider a spammer. So it automatically deletes them or marks them as spam. These are the one that I use to help detour spam bots.

You have to understand in order to fight spam you have to find more than one way to block spam.   I will not be going back to Akismet because I feel I fight back with spam and figure block the ones that I know are spam commenter.     You got to give your comments almost a firewall for bots to get past to get to post comments but there are no guarantees that this will work on all blogs but I do think it is working well with me because of the spam I haven’t gotten in the past few months.   I hope this blog post has helped you and if you know a blogger who is having problems with spam send them to this page.

Have a Good Monday, See you Wednesday!!

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