Blog Tipz

We all hate spam, except for the spammers. Having a blog means that you’ll be dealing with a lot of spam, ranging from the spam received through your email inbox to the comments. While the Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam work great and eliminate a lot of the spam from entering the comments area, they still don’t catch a lot of the comments that appear “human.”

On one of my other blogs, I had one of these plugins running, but I noticed a lot of comments that were completely irrelevant to the post being let through. I had enough of the spam, so I installed the reCAPTCHA plugin (the company was recently acquired by Google, so the process of using it is now done through your Google Account).

The project also works to digitize the text of books (with thirty million captchas solved every day) by having Web users read or interpret the text.

Now, while the plugin eliminates spam, it may also detract some users from leaving comments. This is an issue that must be accepted, especially if you find yourself spending more time deleting spam than replying to legitimate comments.

Setting Up the Plugin

For WordPress users, search for the WP-reCAPTCHA Plugin in the WordPress directory and either download and upload it or use the automated process. Next, activate the plugin, head on over to the My Account Page (you’ll need to sign in using your Google Account), then get the keys for your blog. A number of options are available from the plugin’s page to help you better integrate the plugin into your blog.

A number of other platforms are also supported, including Drupal, Movable Type, phpBB, MediaWiki, Joomla, NucleusCMS, as well as several others. At this time, it doesn’t appear as though Blogger is supported, but I typically don’t see as much spam passing through their built-in filter, anyway.

As a Last-Resort Effort

This plugin is great to help you eliminate spam. Entering the words through reCAPTCHA is typically less painful than some of the other forms of spam prevention, and it’ll eliminate the need to go through hundreds of spam comments.

There are a number of other great plugins available for preventing spam, but I have found this one – in combination with Akismet to catch a majority of the spam/unrelated comments. As a last-resort effort, you can turn off comments on posts that are beyond a certain time period.