While allowing comments on your blog is a valuable way to keep content fresh (and keep search engines busy re-indexing your blog) the issue of comment spam is one of the most frustrating aspects of blog ownership.

If you’re a blog owner then I’m sure you’re well acquainted with comment spammers… all those annoying commenters who dump comments filled with links that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of your blog, viagra links, online pharmacies, pornography etc. Life as a blog owner would be much nicer without these scumbags (Oops, did I say that? Schlap my wrist! LOL)

But did you know that many of those comments have not even been left by real, physical, human visitors? That’s right, a high proportion of those comments are actually automated by insidious computer programs that range around dumping spam comments on every blog it can find. Now THAT is truly annoying!

Thankfully there are methods to help stop comment spam. One of the best wordpress plugins to help stop comment spam is ‘Botproof Captcha’. For those who don’t know a CAPTCHA is defined as a ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’. It’s one of those boxes where you have to type in the displayed characters/numbers before your information is submitted. If you’re on the individual post page right now just look below the post to the comment section to see Botproof Captcha in action.

Most CAPTCHA’s these days are completely useless as bots (computer programs) find them easy to crack. Botproof Captcha is different. Botproof captcha uses dynamic images that shift and change to make it impossible for bots using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize letter and number patterns.

In the words of botproof.com;

Our captchas are made up entirely of “noise”. And it is constantly moving, so no one frame has the complete symbol displaying. Because the human mind is so much more complex than a computer, humans are able to make out the numbers and letters, even though they are moving and changing. This is impossible for any current bot program to do.

I should define the term ‘noise’ here also. Noise refers to the grids, squiggly lines, dots etc that are part of a captcha image. These parts are designed to confuse bots. Unfortunately, they no longer work.

It should be noted that while Botproof Captcha can be installed from within your wordpress dashboard you will need to go to botproof.com to sign up for a free account. It’s like adding a google analytics plugin, you need to have a google analytics account before the plugin works. To add the plugin via your wordpress dashboard simply go to ‘plugins>add new’ in the left hand navigation menu and search for botproof captcha

To provide you with an idea of how effective this plugin is, when I installed it I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments per day to 1-2. Pretty impressive huh? For this reason it is on my list of best wordpress plugins.

Check out my post about another excellent plugin that lets you ban repeated human comment spammers at Best WordPress Plugins – WP Ban. These two plugins combined will dramatically reduce the amount of comment spam your blog receives making your task as a blogger much more enjoyable.

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins around!

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Apart from finding content to update your blog, the next most frustrating aspect of blog ownership is all those spammy comments that you inevitably receive. You know the crap I’m talking about, the pharmacy sites, viagra, pornography etc. It wouldn’t be so bad if that were what your site were about. But these annoying individuals like to inundate blogs with massive long comments with 50-100 links each etc. It’s so disheartening to log in to your dashboard and discover 50, 70 or even 100 of these crappy comments that have absolutely nothing to do with your content.

This kind of behavior has made it necessary for blog owners to either turn off comments altogether or to moderate every single comment that is received (which is what I do with my blogs). Another annoying aspect of this blog spam is that perpetrators frequently leave one or more comments on every single post that is available for commenting.

To combat this type of abuse I recommend what I believe to be one of the best wordpress plugins around called ‘WP-Ban’. This plugin allows you to ban visitors according to

• IP Address
• IP Range
• Host name
• Referrer (website)
• User Agent

You can even exclude individual users from being banned despite banning every other user from their host or country.

But how do you know who to ban. Well, when you go to your comment page within your dashboard you will see that below each comment author is listed their IP address. If there are multiple spam comments coming from the same IP address you simply add that IP address to the banned IP’s in the WP-Ban settings (found under ‘Settings’>'Ban’.

If you find you have several IPs that are similar, for example 92.241.169.135 and 92.241.169.142 then you can either ban those individually or you can ban the everyone from that host by using the wildcard symbol like this 92.241.169.* or you can do it with a range like this ’92.241.169.135-92.241.169.142′

A word of caution here… do NOT ban your own IP in order to test or you will not be able to get back into your dashboard and you will have to ask your host to log in to your blog and remove the ban from your IP.

Once you have added an IP to the ban list, whenever someone using that IP tries to access your page they will be redirected to another page that you can edit from within the plugin settings. I had a little fun with mine and embedded a wav file saying ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that!’ with big red text saying ‘ALL COMMENT SPAMMERS BANNED’. You can find the wav file here

The plugin even supplies statistics of how many times a banned IP has attempted to access the blog. If you find that certain IPs don’t attempt to re-offend then you may remove the ban from that IP simply by removing it from the list. You can always re ban them if they start spamming again.

This excellent plugin is available from http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

Another one of the best wordpress plugins that help stop comment spam is a plugin called ‘Botproof Captcha’. Botproof captcha is a unique captcha plugin that uses dynamic animated images containing a turing number (If you’re on the individual post page right now you will see this plugin in action below). This image is designed to confuse software programs that post automated comments and it works admirably. When I installed this plugin I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments daily to around 2 spam comments per day. I believe this testifies to the effectiveness of the plugin making it one of the best plugins available. This free plugin is available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/botproof-captcha-20/

It should be noted that to use Botproof Captcha you will need to sign up for a free account at botproof.com

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins!

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One of the biggest banes in the existence of a blogger is the amount of comment spam. Even a small, new blog can be receiving 10 spam comments per day (I know, that’s how much this blog was receiving with only one or two posts… sheesh!)

But did you know that the vast majority of this comment spam isn’t even submitted by human traffic? That’s right, 90% of those crap comments you receive come from ROBOTS. You haven’t even had the benefit of having a real person visiting your site.

So, how do you stop comment spam on wordpress blogs?

It’s not as difficult as you might think. If you click the comment link below this post and look at the comment form you will see a captcha below it (a captcha being defined as: “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.)

This is not your average captcha though, this one completely confuses robots because the image changes constantly, making it impossible for robots to read… as such it is guaranteed to stop comment spam on your blog (as long as that comment spam is automatically generated)

Of course, you’ll still have to deal with humans who leave completely inane and off topic comments simply for the sake of gaining a backlink. However, my experience of this tool is that it has cut down comments from around 10 per day (all spammy) to about 1 comment every two days… equating to a 95% reduction in comment spam… pretty good if you ask me.

To help fight human spammers you can activate the akismet plugin that automatically comes with most wordpress themes (oddly enough, even themes created with artisteer have the plugin pre-loaded)

So if you want to a copy of botproof captcha for your own blog please visit Botproof.com

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