If you’ve had a blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed some junk (spam) comments. These are comments which have nothing to do with your posts, but are made just to get links to other sites, often ones related to “adult” or other potentially offensive topics.
I’ve had blogs that got hundreds of these comments in a day. Some people are using automated software to post them.
Some blog owners resort to disabling comments, which is a shame. Allowing people to post comments is a great way to get repeat visitors to your blog.
Some people fight this problem by requiring you to register (create an account) before leaving a comment. This chases away many people, who don’t want to jump through the hoops just to make a comment. The end result is that you will end up with a much smaller number of legitimate comments if you require registration.
I’ve finally found the solution to the problem: a free plugin called Spam Karma. When a comment is posted, Spam Karma analyzes it with a variety of factors to determine if it is spam. You can tweak these factors in your control panel, but I’ve found that it’s not really necessary to do so.
I was skeptical when I first started using Spam Karma, because I’m generally not impressed with spam filters, at least the ones for email. Too often, legitimate emails get flagged as spam, so I have to wade through the spam folder anyway to find the good emails in there. That’s not much different from having all the email in one place and manually deleting the spam.
Somehow, Spam Karma does a very accurate job of figuring out what is spam and deleting it, without deleting the legitimate comments. So far, no one has told me that their comment got deleted.
Another thing I really like about Spam Karma is that it does not require a captcha, those annoying “try to read these scrambled letters and type them correctly” things that seem to be popping up all over the Internet.
There are other plugins which attack this problem, but Spam Karma seems to do a better job. I install it on all my blogs.
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