You Can’t Kill Blog Spam With Aksimet Alone
Sorry, but it’s true. You cannot get rid of spam on your blog if you only use Aksimet if you get a lot of traffic to your site. Like most bloggers, I enable Aksimet as soon as I launch a new blog. It’s very effective when there’s not much traffic, but as soon as the comment spammers know you’re there, it’s a different story. In my experience, Aksimet alone is not enough. Over the years I have tried a lot of solutions to reduce the amount of spam I have to look at. Here are some of the combinations I have tried.
Aksimet and Simple Spam Filter
Simple Spam Filter made a great addition to Aksimet. Created by Joe Tan, the plug-in runs a couple of tests to get rid of all the obvious spam, cutting down on the amount you actually have to see. Unfortunately this plug-in has not been updated in a while so there’s no guarantee it will work with the latest version of WordPress.
Replacing Aksimet with Defensio
On some of my blogs, I’ve tried Defensio, an Aksimet alternative which assigns spamminess scores to comments and also allows you to filter comments by category, block malicious content and get rid of profanity. Defensio works pretty well and it’s easy to get rid of red or orange highlighted comments in the admin interface and reduce the amount of spam you need to see. Defensio doesn’t make many errors, though it’s not perfect either.
Other Comment Systems
I’ve tried a number of comment systems in the past year. Some of these integrate with Aksimet, such as IntenseDebate, while others, such as Echo, have their own spam filtering built in. I’ve even tried Mollom, though it stopped some legitimate people from commenting. All of these cut the amount of spam I had to see (Mollom especially) but didn’t improve the commenting experience for my readers.
Aksimet Auntie Spam
Aksimet Auntie Spam is a Firefox extension that sits on top of Aksimet to reduce the amount of spam you have to look at. You see just the first line of a spam comment, which is more than enough to judge whether it is true spam or a false positive, then you can merrily delete the whole queue. Now that Greasemonkey is coming to Chrome, I may use this extension once again.
Aksimet and No-Spam NX
This is my current spam fighting solution. No Spam NX aims to stop spam coming from bots (which on my blog, seems to be most of it). Since I’ve installed the plugin, I have to see very little spam and no one has complained about being unable to comment. For now, this combo seems to work well, so I’ll stick with it. What spam fighting combination do you use on your blog?
(photo: Thomas Hawk)
Written by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write OnlinePosted on February 4th, 2010 and filed under Blogging
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14 Responses to “You Can’t Kill Blog Spam With Aksimet Alone”
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Six Figure Blogging
I have had no problem with akismet yet, maybe my blog is new or i am not giving follow link anyways its a good post and maybe i might need to come back and read it again.
Hi Nimit, I didn’t have any problem with Aksimet till my blog got more popular. The longer the blog has been around, the more spam it gets, so that’s when you might need another solution.
You should try Ntz antispam plugin. Search for it in your dashboard.
Thanks for the tip, Claus
Does anyone remember SpamKarma2 by Dr. Dave? It was the ultimate spam killer. Shame that it has not been kept up. I would bet that if it were to be brought up to compatibility with the current wordpress code it would mop the floor with all of the options you listed above.
Yes, that was a great plugin, Robeert. Of those I’ve listed Mollom was actually best at stopping spam but since it also ended up messing up the commenting process for users I had to let it go. If your readers aren’t happy, then what’s the point?
Hmmm…I use Ip bann…
Hi Sharon, nice to see you guest posting here. I don’t have the traffic levels you do so Akismet is doing the job for me right now. As my blog becomes more popular I’ll look into some of these. I have a question, does running the two plugins slow down page load time at all? I hear that the use of plugins should be limited because of speed.
Thanks.
@Ileane
It’s a good idea to limit your use of plugins, I’m told, Ileane, though I still run quite a few. I’ve never noticed a lag because of running two anti-spam plugins, as I’ve done it on other blogs with no ill effects.
I am using Disqus at this time, and have Akismet activated. In the past I’ve had spam problems, but so far I can control them with this setup. In fact I moved to Disqus for this very reason. Naturally, there are pros and cons to any system, but for now Disqus is working great.
I admin a very popular site that generates a few hundred comments per post, and the best combination we’ve found is DISQUS commenting system + Askimet + Bad Behavior. (The latter may no longer be necessary, but it was essential before we switched to DISQUS so we don’t want to give it up!) But this 3-part system has completely eliminated spam comments, which has been a huge relief!
Disqus is probably the only commenting system I haven’t tried yet, Scarlett, but it’s good to know it works so well.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. I’ve begun spam fighting from the beginning with Akismet and had the same impression as yours. So, I’m looking for some solution that gets me back my precious time that I have to spend on excluding valuable comments from inside the spam.