Improved spam blocking solution for our blog

We have had been using Akismet as our primary antispam tool for quite a while.  It works okay, but recently we have started to get the feeling we need a better solution. With Akismet were still burdened with a lot of manual moderation for false negatives and scanning detected spam for false positives (can’t say there was a lot of them but ideally there should be zero).  At the same time we don’t want to bother our visitors with a captcha.

Welcome our new “Antispam Squad”:

• Defensio (as alternative to Akismet). It seems its algorithm are more adaptive so we expect less false positives.

Next, we installed three plugins that are intended to decrease the amount of spam comments we have to review by preventing even post spam on the early stage:

• Bad Behavior denies access to the site, based on the request’s HTTP headers and other metadata.
• SABRE prevents bots from registration.
• Antispam Bee – simple but effective. It hides comment form from spam bots.

It’s too early to draw conclusions on (it can take several weeks for educate the Defensio spam filter) how effective this upgrade is, but initial indications are good.

We delete spam and obvious SEO attempts, but our intention is never to censor.  If you are discovering your comments are now getting held up in our spam detection, please contact us.