Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and Akismet

Posted by james on Jan 8, 2007 in wordpress | 4 comments

If you haven’t heard of Akismet and you are running a blog or a forum, PLEASE go and check it out here: “Akismet” It is a free (for personal use) service whereby you can install a plugin, and every comment that gets posted to your blog gets verified against Akismet’s servers to see whether it fits a SPAM profile.

SPAM comments can now go down the drain with the Math Comment Spam Protection PluginOn one of my blogs I was receiving about 300 spam comments a day. Compared to some people, that’s not actually a lot, but for me it was. In WordPress, these comments then sit in a “SPAM queue” waiting for 15 days before being deleted automatically. They sit there so that you can double check them to see whether there are any “false positives“, i.e. comments that are not supposed to be spam. But having to sift through 300 comments a day just in case is a REAL pain in the @$$.

So I installed another plugin, the “Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin“. (As yet, I haven’t installed it on this blog, in case you’re wondering). What THIS plugin does is adds another field to the comment form with a simple maths question, such as “What is 9 + 1″, and when a visitor adds a comment, they have to answer this field correctly for the comment to be submitted.

Does it work? HELL yes!!! I’m now getting 10 SPAM comments a day!

4 comments

  1. Jared
    January 8, 2007

    I love Askimet! its the protect against spam

  2. Quix0r
    January 8, 2007

    @Jared: Not entirely. :) Akismet has pass through many spammy comments. They went in moderation queue anyway because a commenter must have a previously approved comment. On my blog I have installed Bad Behavior 2, Spam Karma 2 and Akismet together and now I only got up to 10 per day, amount is slightly reducing! :)

    This is happening because of I use a spider trap here with some modifications like a tar pit. Spammers doesn’t want to wait so long, so my tar pit is wasting their time a little… ;)

    Hehe, is someone willing to add a tar pit to this Math protection plug-in once there is no answer given? :)

  3. G Web
    October 20, 2008

    So how does Akismet choose who to block and who not to. Does it work on the name, mail or website. Dont have my own blog but am researching currently so your feedback would be appreciated.

  4. james
    October 24, 2008

    Hi G Web… Not exactly sure how Akismet works. I have a feeling it looks at the email address, as well as the content and name, etc.

    Good luck on setting up a new blog. Everybody should have a blog! :-)

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