I was doing an interview for Jenny Munn (http://jennymunn.com/) today regarding “do follow”, comments, SEO, and some other things. One of the questions was, “Do you have to monitor spam more closely or is Akismet still catching most of it?”
I am sure that you are aware that Akismet is the plugin that comes installed when you install WordPress. It is designed to block spam comments from wasting your time. While I do have Akismet running (or at least I thought it was), I don’t recall seeing a lot of spam normally on this site. Some of my other sites… Yes! But here? No.
I had to do a little big of investigating!
So I logged into my Dashboard, clicked on Plugins and I quickly remembered, “Oh yeah… Akismet is running, but I also have another great spam blocker installed – Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. I LOVE this plugin since the first day I discovered it!
I used to have one of those annoying CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) plugins where users had to ‘guess’ what the letters were:
V32ClM? v32DM? V32CIM? I have difficulty reading these things sometimes, so I certainly did not want folks leaving comments on my site to get frustrated trying to figure out what the letter are for these things!
Enter G.A.S.P – the plugin that simply asked the commenter to check a checkbox (you can see it below). Without a checkbox, the comment will not go through! PERFECT! This eliminates all the SpamBots that try to comment on my site.
Now, if a person wants to manually enter a spam comment and click the box, this will not prevent it, but those are usually few and far between compared to the automated robots that troll for sites to leave their comments.
Search for “Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin” in your Dashboard’s Plugin area and give it a shot! I think you will like it.
And also, for SEO and copywriting, check out Jenny Munn!
Paul, thanks for the awesome mention! You’re right, not having to fill out the CAPTCHA form makes blog commenting much less of a hassle. I’ll definitely be checking into that plugin for my blog.