A large wound in the world of blogging, it’s the incredible number of spam in the comments!
Just you land on the web, you’ll already have some spam! And ofcourse, more you will be known, more you spam in your comments!
WordPress, at base, is supplied with the famous plugin Akismet.
But first significant detail already, is there if register before you can use it, simply activate is not enough! Unlike the Wordpress plugins in general…
Second important detail is the operation: Akismet communicates continuously with the company’s servers to see if such or such comment is categorized as spam or not…
It must be said that it is: Akismet is quite effective, but alas some flaws:
- Akismet requires communication with servers, so if they break down, Akismet is most useless (but it happens rarely)
- Akismet considers quite real comments as spam
- If a blogger mark the comment of another blogger (competitor, personal matter, error, etc.) as being a spammer, this is regarded as being a spammer on all sites and blogs have installed Akismet…
- Of fact by many false-positive, reverification is required of all Spam by Akismet marked comments
- Inserts many unnecessary statistics in the database, what increases it unnecessarily
After 3 years use, I decided to replace it because it me soulait all the time to check the comments to see if they really were spam or not, especially since I had a hundred per day!
So I replaced Akismet by Nospamnx.
Nospamnx is of course an antispam, but its operation is different:
- No registration
- No communication with the outside world
- No false-positive
- Uses the Honeypot (Honey Pot) method
The “Honey Pot”, or in french “Honey Pot”, is a straightforward technique to make the difference between a human being and a robot. To leave a comment, you should always at least to fill 2 boxes: your nickname and your comment. But a spam robot, what it does, is that it fills all empty squares, regardless of what they are, besides it is not uncommon to see in spam links instead of the nickname, or links instead of the mail, etc…
So clearly, Nospamnx adds an invisible box for recorders, that spammer computers are hastening to complete (because they see). Comments with false box filled => spam! Not false-positive since readers do not see the box, so can not fill it!
In Nospamnx options, you can also choose either to keep the comments marked as spam in the Junk section or request that it removes directly. Personally, I first asked what he put them in the side, so that I can check if it was really no false-positive who were classified as spam, but having regard to efficiency, I quickly changed the options so that it removes.
Of course, as nothing is perfect in this world, Nospamnx can pass some spam, but these are quite rare: in 3 months, he has left go 3… on more than 10000 spam blocked…
To find the plugin Nospamnx, it is present in the official library of Wordpress plugins.