The no. of online Spam is increasing every day. WordPress Blogs are Websites are one of the most affected ones. Spammers have become so experienced that it has become impossible for novice users to differentiate between a spam comment and a regular comment. Before we talk about any anti spam plugin, let’s take a look at some of the contents of a Typical Spam comment on WordPress:
Excellent Post, I have Bookmarked your site
I am so glad to have found your website. I Have shared it and bookmarked it.
These are just 2. And there are so many more similar to these. Mostly praises about your content. Trust me 95% of them are spam. And Sometimes you can receive so much spam non-stop on your site that it would start causing database or internal server errors on your site.
How to Manually detect a Spam Comment?
This is easy A Spam comment will always have a url. Either in the comment content or in the field of Author URL. Also, the name of the commenter will not be an actual name but some SEO Keyword.
Secondly, the comment won’t be specific to your content. It would be a generalized praise about your writing or your website.
You can manually filter out these comments easily. But this becomes a problem when you start getting a lot of comments a day. Even 10 Spam comments a day become a problem and would start wasting your time as the popularity or age of your site increases.
Use Akismet as a Spam Blocker for Comments
Akismet is one of the Most popular plugins among WordPress users. It comes bundled with most Default WordPress installations. So if you haven’t activated this plugin yet, you will find it in your Dashboard > Plugins.
Akismet is free
Even though it may seem at Akismet.com that its a paid service. But they have a free version for all personal WordPress blogs. So just go to Akismet.com and sign up and get your API Key. Make sure to select the Basic plan and set the price to Zero Dollars.
If you have a commercial site and want to avoid the expense of $5 per month. You can skip Akismet altogether and choose the next plugin we will talk about.
The problem with Akismet
Honestly, Akismet is Fantastic. But one thing which has always bothered me is its accuracy. Akismet has an accuracy of only 80-90%. Inkhive.com received around 100+ Spam comments every day at a time. And Akismet still left around 10-15 comments every day for us to manually mark as Spam.
And Akismet is not Intelligent. If you mark a particular comment as Spam manually. Akismet would still show you another comment of the same type. Ideally, it should detect and learn which comments are spam if you manually tell them. Just like we do it with email spam filter.
Some of you might be reading this article, even if you are using Akismet. There is another and better solution for you!
WP Cerber – Best Anti Spam Plugin
From our personal experience, we have found that instead of filtering Spam Comments its better to use a Captcha to make it impossible for bots to leave comments. In fact, we wanted an anti spam plugin which would do a little more than just block spam comments.
We Found WP Cerber.
It’s an All Round Security plugin for your website. Here is how WP Cerber can help you prevent Spam.
WP Cerber allows you to place reCaptcha Verification on your comment forms. It’s Google’s Recaptcha so it’s effective and accurate, and easy to use. Most users just have to check the box in the Recaptcha field, to submit their comments.
Suspcious users would have to do a little more than that. (you probably would have seen something like this on other sites)
Make it more user-friendly
We agree that having a Captcha box affects user experience and sometimes the looks of the site are also compromised.
Enter: Invisible Captcha
Google created this amazing piece of technology, which can detect regular users from bots, by just checking their browsing habits. This is highly accurate and bothers only bots. We use it on some of our other sites and haven’t had any problems till now.
WP Cerber already supports invisible recaptcha, so you don’t need to install any other plugins for it. Just Sign up on Google using the link above for invisible recaptcha, get your API keys and provide it in WP Cerber > Captcha Settings.
And that’s the End of your SPAM Problem on WordPress. Let us know if you use any other anti spam plugin to block spam comments on WordPress!