As you well know, I was having some trouble with spam being fed into my comments section by some very nasty SpamBots. Although they weren’t being displayed on my site, because I have to moderate every comment, it was still a pain in the ass, as I have to go through them and delete them and then also delete the email alerts that I get everytime I have a comment posted in one of my blog entries.
So I was on the lookout for a plugin that worked as a spam blocker, kind of the one like Mack D.Male has on his website. If you want to submit an entry, his spam blocker will ask you to enter a random generated number, which will be displayed next to your comment. That in effect keeps the bots from entering any spam comments in your blog. Not 100% but then what is?
So I searched the net for any such free spam blockers and I found a huge list of such stuff. I downloaded a few and tried them out like Authimage, CompPreVal & Spam Karma 2. Some are quite complicated as it involves not just downloading the .php files but then even altering some of your own files in wordpress. I tried a couple of times but I just ended up getting some errors. Then I found Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin, which is available for download from his website, Peter’s Useful Crap which is free.
It works like a charm! Immediately on activating this plugin, I logged out of wordpress and did a test comment myself and I could only enter the comment upon entering a word. I hope this will be enough to keep those assholes at bay. I am sure that a few will eventually seep through, as the guys who create spambots make them even more intelligent and figure out ways to enter the random generated words or numbers shown in the images. But until then, I think I can rest assured.
Thanks very much Peter. You have given me and many more like me a respite from all that nonsense that those spammers keep pushing on to blogs. Thanks a ton.
Song for the day – “Hello Mr.Timebomb” – MATTHEW GOOD BAND
Looks good to me! I think I like numbers still :)
Yeah Mack. I hope that solves the issue with the spammers. You won’t believe the number of crap comments I got, man. I was getting so frustrated. And yeah, I was looking out for numbers as well, but I can change that in the php files. It’s great rite? Not even one spam comment since! :D
Think you could post a review of it, say in a month or so?
I might move off blogger in the future and host everything on my own domain. If I do so I wouldn’t mind knowing what to use right off the bat :D.
I think you shud. Won’t cost much to setup a domain and some server space. Look I got mine from a US based company – they gave me 700 MB space for just $44 a year. That is cheap!