Catching spam while making money online!

Once your blog starts to gain popularity, along with it comes a huge inflow of comment spam. This can distract you away from what you do best — write blog posts which help you retain your reader base and in turn makes you money online!

The built-in spam control in WordPress is quite minimal and will not scale when there is a large inflow of spam.

I’m focusing on the 2 popular anti-spam tools that is available for WordPress — Akismet and Spam Karma. For a more comprehensive list of available anti-spam tools, visit the WordPress website.

Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. Akismet works on an interesting architecuture that sends the comments to a server for validation and based on the response from there, it marks the comment as good or bad. This ensures that once you have Akisment installed, there is never a need to upgrade its “spam database” since that is remotely located and always up-to-date.

Spam Karma

Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenter’s.

Besides using one of the above, you could look at using it in conjunction with Simple Spam Filter which is covered as a “bonus” below…

Simple Spam Filter

This does not do the same kind of magic as Akismet or Spam Karma. It just looks for the following 3 patterns in the comment:

• Contains 5 or more links to external sites
• Contains [url=http://www.example.com]example[/url] style links
• Contains a word that matches a short list of common spam words (for example, viagra or cialis). See the plugin’s source for the full list.

Finding any of these trends, the comment is marked as spam. A combination of Simple Spam Filter and Akismet works quite well.Online Presence currently using Akismet only.

There is another good article titled Combating Comment Spam at WordPress which is worth reading.