FreePress Blog

As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been reading this blog (or Dan’s) for a while, I’ve been trying out various alternatives for preventing comment spam on my blog, and today I just started a new experiment, which I believe will be very successful.

The two main anti-spam plugins for Wordpress are “Spam Karma 2″ and Akismet (there are others too, but these are the main ones I’ve used). WP2 comes with Akismet preinstalled, so most Wordpress blogs probably use that, unless the blog owner is savvy enough to experiment with other plugins and/or gets tired of how much spam Akismet still lets slip through the cracks. Anyway, Akismet works by forwarding the comment to a server and having the server give a yes/no reply as to whether it is considered spam or not. SK2 works completely on the blog server, analyzing a comment in a number of ways (which you can add to with plugins), and gives a comment positive and negative “karma” points as it is evaluated, which will ultimately determine its fate. I could go into more technical details, but you can search my previous entries for more on what I think of the merits of the different approaches.

Today (just now actually) I moved back to using SK2, and added a check against Akismet as a SK2 plugin, so that the Akismet reply becomes part of the overall karma of the comment, but is not the only line of defense. I expect to get dramatically fewer spams now, and I will be tweaking the configuration if necessary over the next few months, and perhaps eventually packaging up what I’m using and releasing it with the default settings configured to what I’ve found works for me.