in Technology

Get off Spammers!

I wrote about comment spam I was getting on my blogs a while ago. I didn’t bother to do anything about it, but last week it just went out of hands.

I used to get about 250 spam comments everyday on both mehtanirav and TrustAndFreedom. The Magnet blog also gets lot of spam.

I didn’t want to install a Captcha on the blog as the server does not have GD support. And I found WP-HashCash. It’s pretty simple to setup, does not require GD, and is 100% effective! I did not have any spam for the last three days!

I strongly recommend HashCash for anybody using WordPress!

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  1. Hi Nirav I too had been plagued by spammers once but I installed the Spam Quiz plugin (http://www.i-marco.nl/wp/wordpress/) and I have since enjoyed a spam free blog.

    What Spam Quiz does is, ask a simple random question from your specified list of questions and once the user answers the question, he can comment.

    I initially used some spelling and such questions but am now using it to ask simple math question. It works!

    And oh… I love your blog.

    Regards.

  2. Thanks for the reference Shashank. I did not want to add an extra step in the comment process. Wanted to make it seamless for actual visitors! Hence opted for HashCash. 🙂

    And thanks for the second last line 😉

  3. I checked out Akismet.. It said you need a key from wordpress.com – I don’t have a wordpress.com account so I didn’t move forward. Now I may be wrong, but that’s what I understood from their site!

  4. Yes you need a key and for that you need a wordpress.com account – but the account is free and the hassle is worth it. I recently created an Akismet addon for Pixelpost Photoblog and I was impressed more so as to how it did not flag my test SPAM as SPAM but managed to catch every real one.

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