There is an area in my site that I built with Wordpress. Two weeks ago there were 120 spams of medical stuff, all in one page. I removed the option of commenting that page.

Now I've just found 180 spams, this time in diverse entries. They were several random general comments ("great information" etc), and all with the same type of mispelling error of switching letters (such as ansewr instead os answer).

All comments require approval, so these didn't go live, anyway it's a pain to have to deal with that. Any good solution? I know there are anti-spam plugins, but I would like experienced opinion.

I got a plug in that works very well with auto commenting..gimmie a sec


go to plugins... add new and search this one  Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

I use it on all my wp sites.

it adds a box that must be checked off. Seems that the auto comment software have not caught up to that simple trick yet.

Note: it will not stop manual comments.

I use:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
and I never had one spam comment in my pending list. All Spam went straight to the trash. Love it.

Hi Adelaide,
I use the WP-SpamFree plugin on my blog and since I installed it back in 2009, I didn't get any spam comment. You don't have anything to do other than install the plugin, and visitors aren't bothered with captcha's or similar annoying things when leaving a comment.
Hope it helps

Thanks for you suggestions. Akismet is a paid service, right? So I will leave it off for the time being.

I wonder, how do these tools recognize spam from a real comment?

Quote from: madelaide on August 22, 2011, 22:31
Thanks for you suggestions. Akismet is a paid service, right? So I will leave it off for the time being.

I wonder, how do these tools recognize spam from a real comment?

no it is free.

Quote from: madelaide on August 22, 2011, 22:31
Thanks for you suggestions. Akismet is a paid service, right? So I will leave it off for the time being.

I wonder, how do these tools recognize spam from a real comment?

I'm not paying one cent for it. They may have a premium service but I'm not using it.

https://akismet.com/signup/

I remember having visited them a while ago, when I first got spams in one of my blogs. My understanding is that it is only free for personal use. But if I make advertisement to my photos and products, isn't it commercial use?

Curiously they put $0-120 per year in the non-commercial personal use. I guess high volumes require a payment even for non-commercial usage.

I used to delete two or three new spam comments everyday on my personal website, untill I stumbled upon a great tip - tried it and it works great, haven't had a spam comment (or e-mail) since!

The idea is to add a hidden input field (well, the text field itself is not hidden, but it needs to be placed inside a <div> with visibility set to "none" from the stylesheet - bots are clever.) Call the text field "email" and your actual, visible e-mail field something completely unrelated. Then make a function that checks if the false / hidden e-mail input field has been given a value and redirect to a trap-site or Google or whatever if that's the case. If the fake e-mail field field is empty, the comment will be posted.

It's not possible for regular users to see or fill out the field, bots however, will.

Can't believe how great it works - not a single spam comment ever since - given all the annoying captchas out there