I’ve had this on my list of post ideas for months now and haven’t seemed to get round to posting about it, but a recent question from a friend about what I used to handle comment spam reminded me about it.
I use WordPress to power this site and ever since day one I received lots of spam, at first I just manually cleaned them up but once I started getting some decent traffic I had to move onto a more automated solution. So looked at lots of different plugins for WordPress and tried about 5 or 6 until I came across the fantastic Spam Karma plugin , since that day I haven’t looked back.
I think I’ve had to manually moderate 3 or 4 comments that Spam Karma couldn’t handle automatically out of the 20,000 it has caught and I’ve not seen any false positives. So the long and short of it is if you’re having problems with comment spam (and I don’t know who doesn’t these days) and using WordPress then Spam Karma will be a blessing to you.
One thing I’d love to see is a standalone version of the Spam Karma system, i.e. not just a WordPress plugin as it seems that spam bots have become really aggressive recently and hammer away at any form that have a textarea (actually I’ve seen comment spam come as from forms that only have selects and radio buttons).