Friday Five: Anti-Spam Plugins

Comment spam sucks! It just does.

It slows your site down, takes up space in your database, takes a ton of time to remove and just plain sucks.

The best way to fight it is to prevent it from happening. There are several anti-spam plugins for Wordpress. Over the years I used many of them. Some work, some don’t. Some work for awhile and need replaced.

Here are five plugins that you can install to improve your blog, because who has time to remove all those prescription drug comments?! These plugins do not add an ugly captcha to your site.

1. Stop Spammers Spam Control
   This one is a bit complex with several pages of configuration settings. I like that I can see a summary of the spam it has stopped and there’s a simple link to report spam that made it through. I have it installed on one site and it’s doing a great job, but if you don’t have the patience to go through and tweak the settings I don’t recommend it.
2. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin
   G.A.S.P. is pretty easy to set up. It uses javascript to place a checkbox on your comment form asking users to confirm they are legit. While easy to use, this one does still let a few comments through. It does integrate nicely, much better than an ugly captcha.
3. Wordpress Zero Spam
   This one is easy to use. Install and activate. Can it get any easier? This one works well with Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms and Contact Form 7.
4. Anti-spam by CleanTalk
   Integrates nicely with almost everything, that’s a big plus. This one also blocks spam registrations, contact emails and more. You can set this one to auto-delete comments marked as spam. Yay! While I haven’t used it yet, this is the next one I’m installing.
5. Anti-Spam
   I use this one quite a bit. It does just the invisible fields by javascript method. It has worked quite well for the sites that I have it installed on. I have not seen any spam comments get through. It does not work on forms, so that is something to keep in mind (and why I will likely switch to Anti-spam by CleanTalk).

There are many, many options for controlling spam. Please use one. Don’t make me groan when I log into your site and see 4583 comments that need approved.

If it’s too late and you do have a ton of unapproved comments let’s get them cleared. I’ll remove straight from the database which is much faster than doing it via your admin area. I guarantee you will notice a difference.