I recently re-launched this blog and for quite some years I have been having problems with spam. This blog is powered by WordPress — probably the most popular blog software out there. It is a popular target for spammers and other attachers who want to spread their “news”. Since the inception of this blog 13+ years ago, I’ve been receiving a lot of spam comments.
To fight off that spam, I’ve installed a plug-in called “Spam Karma” many years ago. It was working quite well, but for some reason it has stopped working. That’s probably related to the fact that the developer stopped maintaining it quite some years ago.
WordPress has its own spam fighting plug-in, which ships with WordPress by default. However, that’s built on top of an online service that you need to subscribe to. To have any significant spam fighting result, that subscription costs money. I can understand why they’re charging for their service as it keeps its database up-to-date with all the typical spam phrases, keywords, methods, etc. that those really creative spammers come up with. Yet, I believe there are a lot of other techniques that can be deployed before having to look at those real-time databases to catch the latest spam.
In fact, almost all spam I receive is always the same kind of stuff. There’s pharmaceutical products, health product, online products/services/websites, etc. To the naked eye comments relating such topics can be easily identified as spam. It’s not just the content, but also the way how these comments are composed, how their authors are called, what their backlink links to, etc.
So I ended up using a different anti-spam plug-in called “Antispam Bee” and as a form of saying “Thank you” to the author, I’m writing this blog post. I hope they are getting more people using their plug-in. It seems to work fine for me so far. The chart above shows the number of spam my antispam bee is collecting by day. It’s not that many at the moment, but if you add this up over the year, I would end up with thousands of spam comments, which I simply don’t have the time to process manually.
So again, a special thanks to the developers of Antispam Bee. Great job!
If someone of you is in the need of a spam fighting plug-in. Give the Antispam Bee a try. It works well for me.
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