Today I’ve installed Dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2 plugin to protect against comment spam on our WordPress blogs. We’ve had a number of spam comments reported over the last week or so. This is the price of moving to a more popular blog platform, I guess. This wasn’t an issue with the eZpublish blogs, which didn’t attract spam at all.
The Spam Karma 2 plug-in is sophisticated, and judges what’s likely to be spam by using a range of factors. These include, for example.
- Is the commenter a member of the Exc-el Edublogs community?
- Are there a lot of hyperlinks in the comment? (often a characteristic of spam)
- How long were they on the post before commenting?
There are many more factors. If the system gets suspicious, it may ask for a captcha to be completed.
If you’ve got an Exc-el blog and have been affected by comment spam, let me know what difference you notice. It should now be protecting all of them. There’s a huge range of settings that can be tweaked if necessary.