Computer Realm

When it comes to blogs, one of the biggest hurdles to get over is dealing with spam. Thus making sure you have the best tools to fight spam could probably save you a lot of hassle.

When you take ‘Wordpress‘ and ‘Spam’, the first word that would pop into anyone’s head is Akismet and rightfully so. Akismet is installed by default on Wordpress and does a good job at combatting spam but does it really? While it’s a ‘good’ plugin, it always can get better. Specially when it comes to ‘False Positives’ where i’ve often found legitimate, valuable comments from readers lost in the middle of hundreds of spam comments.

While a few comments lost due to the false positives factor may not be such a big deal, commenting and that sense of community is an integral part of a blog and visitors having their voice heard could be one of the main reasons to visit your blog. As a result, missing a few legitimate comments could lose you a dedicated, loyal reader of your blog who could go on to recommend your blog to more visitors and so on which is what makes every approved comment a plus point towards your blog’s success.

Looking for an alternative spam shielding plugin which filters spam efficiently and prevents the loss of false positive comments brought me to Spam Karma. While I was weary of trying out a different plugin which provides a solution for such a critical issue on my blog, Andy Beard was very convincing on why Spam Karma is better so i’ve decided to give it a shot.

It has features such as the Blacklist (where comments are compared to blacklist servers which keeps tabs on blacklisted URL’s and IP’s based on entries of blocked IP’s and Domains added by other users of the plugin), link counter (wordpress has a built-in feature for this but still), stopwatch (which prevents automated spam as it makes sure that comments that have been made by visitors in too short a time are filtered), the ’snowball effect’ (which is based on how loyal the commenter has been) and plenty more.

Andy Beard’s post on Spam Karma is what made me give spam karma a try so I decided to use as his ‘best preferences‘ for the plugin as well.

Based on first impressions, for now i haven’t had to skim through hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks to find false positives in the Akismet spam queue and as for negative points, the fact that the Spam Karma panel is in the ‘Manage’ section instead of the ‘Comments’ section seems to bother me. I’m still waiting for the ‘Digest’ where i would receive emails periodically (i’ve set it to 24 hours) on potential spam. I’ll update this post(see below) when i’ve received it on how it helps.

I’m currently using Spam Karma on a test phase, i’ll leave an update after some time on my experience and which plugin is better in my opinion.

Update about the email notification - Email updates show up whenever there’s enough data collected on comments and sums up all basic details of the comments from the previous updates like total spam caught, number of comments caught and details on how the spam were caught, i.e. which detection method, Javascript, stopwatch, etc.

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