WordPress Plugin Review: Akismet (Anti-Spam)
Akismet is the de facto standard in spam prevention. It’s easy to set up, included with WordPress by default and is all that’s needed for many blogs.
Check out this step-by-step tutorial for what Akismet for WordPress is, how to set it up, how to get your Akismet (WordPress.com) API key, and a little coverage of managing your spam folder.
Recently however, problems have arisen with Akismet’s algorithm and sometimes comments simply vanish. The bigger problem though for making this list is that Akismet keys are no longer free for business use. $60/yr is too steep for most micro-businesses to afford right out of the gate.
Rating: 3 Stars
There’s also the fact that with high traffic it may not be enough protection (but no single plugin meets that qualification).
I have tracked down two viable, reliable alternatives to Akismet that currently remain free.
Be sure to keep an eye on the spam box though, with all of these solutions, because like all spam prevention solutions, this occasionally marks a good post as spam.
Love Akismet? Hate Akismet? Couldn’t live without Askimet? Let me know what you think! How are you fighting the war on spam? Are you managing to keep your friendly commentors rescued from the spam folder on a regular basis? Are you winning?
If you enjoy this post and found it useful I hope that you will bookmark it , share it, tweet it and generally spread the word! Thank you for your support and look forward to reading and replying to your comments below!
Kimberly
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Akismet is another WordPress Plug in that I use. Thus far, it has caught all of my spam. As my newer site gets larger I imagine I’ll use something in addition to Akismet. I had to do that with my larger websites, since Akismet (although amazing) couldn’t handle all the spam I’d get.
What are your thoughts of those that leave the obvious spam on their blogs? Do you think that could potentially hurt how readers view their site? I’ve seen that on a few blogs, where the owners wrote a lot of articles, but did nothing to block their spam. I couldn’t help but think that approach wasn’t a great practice to have. Simply installing an anti-spam plugin would have done wonders.
Moondancer invites you to read…Getting motivated What’s your inspiration
I totally don’t understand sites that don’t monitor for spam. They just beg to be spammed. They destroy a chance to build conversations because no ones going to read through all the spam posts to attempt to find good information. The only reason I can think they do it is either (a) lazy or (b) of the oppinion that any evidence of traffic is better than none. Of course, theres a lot of novice bloggers that get “taken” by spammy comments that “sound” real.
Akismet was catching all of mine, but being Dofollow/etc, I was generating 100+ pieces a day and couldn’t keep up with monitoring it. Thats when it was time for captcha and other techniques. If you cant monitor your spam filter and fish out your false positives its time to up the strength IMHO.
What other methods have you looked at to increase the strength?
Kimberly
I use Bad Behavior and was WP-Spam Free. I really liked WP Spam-Free, it worked similar to Captcha, but did that invisibly, so your commenter’s didn’t have to fill out the code.
WP-Spam Free was pulled off of the WordPress site a few months ago, I know a few users had commented that although it was blocking trackbacks from spammy sites, it was blocking good sites too. I think it had something to do with a few WP Plug not working with each other, but I know those bloggers dropped it since their questions weren’t being answered. It was about the same time that they were dropped from WP, so I’m imagining he stopped supporting it? I just checked out the URL on WordPress and it states he’s not supporting it since he’s busy with school. It’s a shame, because that was a very good Plugin.
Oh thanks for mentioning DoFollow! I use that on my sites too, but forget to enable it on Celebrate Life, after I had the ComLuv issue last week, Whoops…
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I left WP-Spam Free after more than a few of my readers told me that either it went or them commenting on my blog did! I found it over agressive both in what it considered spam and in its IP ban behavior.
The problem with banning IPs is what Akismet is currently facing (However, in akismets case the comment says its submmitted and then just vanishes into thin air, leaving one more confused as to whether the blog author hates you.) I ran bad behavior for a long time, but after discovering all this issues with “banned” dynamic addresses that sometimes thousands and thousands of people share, I havent been able to bring myself to reenable it. It actually goes to some length to avoid that issue though and if I add anything to my stack, it will be that one.
At the moment, since I’ve taken a traffic dip while moving hosts, I’m actually ONLY running si-captcha (and using commentors must have 2 approve posts to avoid moderation). I saw someone left me about 4 posts yesterday that were hand entered, passing my captcha, but all in all not bad.
Now that’s not to say that even Si-Captcha doesnt have its down side. We recently discovered that the Faster Fox add-on for Firefox, which turns out to be a caching tool, caches the captcha images and means you never are able to see a current one (so its always a wrong answer).
Yeah, when plugins fall unsupported, if they’ve got a laundry list of issues, people don’t flock to volunteer to take over support on them. As it stands you’d have to get a good developer to code on them and that would cost someone some money if they couldn’t do it themselves. I’ve got several plugins, the one that sends these follow up emails (Comment Reply Notification) being one of them, that I plan to have some work done on in the near future and then donate back. Taking up donations from all the folks that have asked about the silly thing
That reminds me I need to get it a donation button!
Hope you’re having a wonderful day!
Kimberly
I remember running into a few issues with BadBehavior, but that was a few years ago. I remember I had stopped using it because it got out of hand. A few of my regular readers weren’t able to comment, I remember at one time it said I couldn’t comment. Crazy stuff! I reinstalled it a little while ago, haven’t had any issues.
It’s always nice to recognize the developers. I donate for the WP Plug ins that I use. It definitely takes time to come up with the many fabulous Plugins that are available; I try to let them know how much it is appreciated via a Paypal donation.
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Hi Kim,
I just discovered this post. I have recently been going through a lot of Akismet hell, along with a lot of fellow bloggers. I have been disappointed with the lack of quality support from their team (which seems to consist of one person). I have also blogged about this in the past; you can see the post if you visit my site.
Thank you for helping to spread the word about this problem!
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I think Askimet has too many false positives which are being caught and then revalidated by bloggers who don’t check their spam folder to “fix” that status for legitimate comments. I think using an alternative till they get their algorithm fixed is a good idea…at least a lot of the community is starting to think that.
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Hi Kim,
It also happened to me where in my comments does not appear and there are time when I asked the blog owner if my comment was on the spam box, what they replied to me is that there are no comments made by me so does it mean my comment vanish upon sending?
Vhinz
Thank you for the review!
I just signed up for Akismet and I am hopeful…
Gonna do another review in a few days after I have a chance to see if the Spam is gone for good!
Enjoy your blog!
deer
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