Akismet is an incredible spam preventer for WordPress sites. I’d say it does 95% of the work for us. A few issues though make me want to augment it with other tools:

  1. Some spam still slips through
  2. It doesn’t prevent spam that seems easy to block
  3. There are false-positives, so spam still needs to be checked

#1 is no big deal, we can nuke the slips pretty easily. We even have WordPress comment settings such that all comments need to be manually approved these days, so those that slip through need to be moderated anyway, so never see the light of day.

Here’s an example of #2:

generic-spam WordPress Comment Spam design tips

We get enough of that that it’s pretty obnoxious. A few hundred per week. And because of #3, that means sifting through loads of crap to make sure no real comment is lost in the junk.

I used the Pro version of the Anti-spam plugin. That plugin page doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence, but I used it for years and it worked pretty well. Again, it’s weird to run two spam plugins, but Akismet and Anti-spam seemed to work together well. Anti-spam added a bit of extra protection:

The blocking algorithm is based on 2 methods: ‘invisible js-captcha’ and ‘invisible input trap’ (aka honeypot technique).

But unfortunately, I had to disable it. We flipped on Jetpack comments because I liked the idea of having a comment form that allows for social login. The idea of typing in your name and email and all that is so old school that it’s a turn off for a new generation of blog commenters. The fact that Jetpack offers that seems like an easy win. When Anti-spam was enabled, it must send some extra data or something bizarre that freaks out Jetpack, and it makes all comments throw an error when submitted.

With Anti-spam off, now we’re flooded with the “easily blocked” style spam. Not the end of the world, but not ideal.

I wonder if other folks have had this issue and have what they consider a pretty sweet WordPress spam prevention system? Maybe some kind of honeypot technique that somehow doesn’t screw up Jetpack Comments?


WordPress Comment Spam is a post from CSS-Tricks