I’ve been running this anti-spam plugin for a few days now because bots were bypassing my captcha by registering, or they were able to solve it. I was getting around 15 spam comments a day, maybe more.
When I first implemented the captcha, I didn’t get any spam at all really. Then the spam started to come more and more. Just think, if I had no captcha running or any other anti-spam plugin I would be dealing with 100′s of spam comments a day no doubt. WP-SpamFree has really kept it spam free so far. I wasn’t really looking for it either I just saw it in my WordPress dashboard and installed it from there. Gotta love WordPress. Be aware however that you will need to enable javascript and cookies so you can post. Most people have these on by default anyway.
If your blog is suffering a spam issue I highly recommend this plugin. I’m still going to leave the captcha in place just for extra measure, but I’m really happy to be living spam free for the time being.


Why I Disabled Comments On Older Posts
Monday, January 3rd, 2011I’ve started to wonder if having comments is even worth it. Most people don’t comment, the ones that do don’t have much useful information to share most of the time. Sometimes they do, but really I tend to think discussions are better off on forums.
Comment sections always have spammers even if you have all the protections in place, you’re still going to get them. Yes, even if you’re using recaptcha or similar. People from India are paid to solve these captchas. When Web 2.0 started, it really helped out spammers, because now they had tons of places to spam.
On a lower traffic site like mine, 99% of comments are spam. I do get real visitors, but they don’t really comment, as expected. So in my situation, it’s easier just to turn them off if a post is older than 7 days. If the site starts getting thousands and thousands of unique visitors per day I might enable them again. That’s not real likely with my current writing patterns and keywords, but who knows. I just write what I feel like on here and I’m not targeting anything.
Tags: blog, comments, spam
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