A Good Spam Squisher

In this case the spam squisher in question is called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress, and so far it’s been more effective at eliminating cerain types of spam to my blog than any other plugin.

Having any sort of comment functionality on your blog means you’re going to get spam at some point or another. Even a little site like mine with virtually no traffic compared to a lot of other blogs out there can get plenty.

As this is a WordPress based site I’ve got the Askimet plugin running on it by default, and it does catch it’s fair share of rubbish comments, but I was still getting a good 10 or more spam comments in my comment queue to moderate every day. Again, not a lot, but enough to get on your wick after a while – especially seen as 99% of them were just big, long lists of spammy links. In the WordPress admin you can already set up a filter to say… “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 5 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)”… but that still meant I had to manually delete all those dud comments.

So, after a bit of googling I found an awesome little plugin called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress (download it here). This little wonder, like WordPress, can be set up to “Block comments with 15 or more links to external sites “ – but by block it mean delete/kill/exterminate – i.e. it the crappy comment never even appears in your spam queue and it’s automatically squashed.

I personally think this is a feature that should be added to WordPress by deafult, but until that day, TanTan’s plugin will do just fine.

So if anyone’s genuinely trying to post a comment on my blog with more than 15 url’s

in it – sorry, but I can’t hear you, you’ll have to try shouting a little louder. But, I’m pretty confident any comment with that many links if guaranteed to be one of the bad guys, and TanTan’s plugin dealing with it so I don’t have to can only be a good thing.