Akismet Alone is Not Enough

There are many anti-spam plugins available on the net that you can use to prevent your website from getting/blocking more spams in comments or trackbacks. Some of them are working just fine and some of them are too strict which even blocking human visitors (there are two types of visitors, human and robots) from visiting your website. I’m sure many of WordPress users use Akismet (wiki) as their website spam protection because it comes in the installation package. But using Akismet alone is not enough. Why?

Akismet will check the comment entered and compare it with the database in Akismet web service. If it found that the comment is a spam, it will block and waiting you to decide whether to delete or de-marked it as spam. If you only use Akismet plugin, you will get about 10 or 30 (maybe more) spams caught in one day. And some of the comments maybe came from legit visitors comment or we can say good comments. Do you will use the all-delete button or you will analyze each comments one by one?

Here is the Akismet statistic that I pull out from Akismet stats page:

Total spam: 372,630,209
Total ham: 27,310,898

The total spams caught still increasing. And what we can do as Akismet user to slow down the increasing rate? To reduce these spams, you need to use some other plugins to help Akismet from doing so many jobs. I personally use Math Comment Spam Protection. This plugin will let visitors to answer math question and enter the correct answer before it stamp the comment into the database. If wrong number entered, you need to go back and learn some maths before you can give comments. Lol… :d After I use this plugin, spams caught by Akismet has been reduced to about 5 or 6 compared to if I don’t use, which always about 10 or 30 spams in a day.

If you don’t want use math comment protection, you can use another options of protection that we call it as Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) (wiki). The difference between Captcha and Math Protection is, you need to enter word or numbers displayed on the image created. If the word or numbers entered same with the image, Captcha will granted the comment as a good comment.

Example of WordPress plugin that using Captcha is Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Plugin. I never use this plugin, so I don’t know how it performs. But based on Thilak post, it seems like this plugin is really good. And from my understanding, Captcha can also be use to reduce the spams in your Akismet.

As conclusion, don’t rely only on one protection. You need more to enhance the effectiveness of your spam guard. But using too much protection is not good. So use one or three plugins are already enough. Hope this helps. 🙂 [tags]spam, guard, captcha, plugin[/tags]

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