Fighting Blog Spam
Posted by ben, Thu Feb 01 10:10:00 UTC 2007
I was blown away by the amount of blog spam this blog has already brought in considering that it is brand new and readership isn’t really up yet. So, I installed 2 WordPress plugins that seem to stop it in its tracks.
The first is Akismet, which is a spam filter that works much like a spam filter on your email. It seems to work really well, but I also wanted to prevent most of the spam from even getting to that point so I chose an easy to read CAPTCHA system called Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam. It is an easy to read CAPTCHA based off of phonetic words so it a lot easier on people trying to post comments. This also means that it is easier for some bots to read, those few bots that were obviously written by pure evil, but their post will get stopped by the first plugin.