Up until a few days ago, I was using a combination of Askimet and Spam Karma to keep spam at bay. It worked quite well too, and kept out most of the spam comments that were coming in (up to 200 a week lately). But due to me trying to track down a mysql problem, I disabled Spam Karma.

Silent Bulk Filtering:

Although Askimet does a good job by itself, I wanted to add a pre-filter layer to stop the bulk of spam (most of which is very obvious) from every being recorded in the system. After a bit of searching, I came across the TanTan Spam filter. It does exactly what I was looking for, and allows you to configure some simple paramters to block spam before it gets tangled up with the database, or Askimet.

A url limit, regex pattern matcher, and word filter are included as blocking devices. I installed it yesterday, and started watching the stats. In the past 24 hours, I’ve had only one spam comment get through to Askimet, with 35 more being blocked at the source by TanTan.

Update: now up to 182 blocked by TanTan, with only 4 through to askimet (all of which were also spam)

Think of it this way - if you’re worried about good comments getting marked as spam, then this plugin is great at making sure you don’t have to wade through mountains of spam looking for any wrongly marked comments. It’s also useful for relieving calls to the database, since the comment is never saved, or analysed by other plugins.

The plugin was never designed as a catch-all, but as the first line of defence. It cuts out the masses, so you can deal with the rest. Great idea, and something that I think should possibly be integrated into askimet itself (since it ships with wordpress).

What else could I use?

The only other plugin I have considered using is Bad Behavior, since it blocks potentially bad requests from ever gaining access to the blog (and so further helps to relieve the load on the database). However, as I use wp-cache, I’m able to do without it for now.

There is unfortunately no way to alter the BB whitelist without editing a file, and support for it seems poor at the moment. OIOpublisher API calls sometimes get caught up in BB blocking, and I have no way to tell BB that the API calls should be allowed.

In Conclusion:

I’m quite happy with the new spam duo, although I should point out that you should never remain static in the fight against spam. If new possibilities arise, then follow them up, and always keep an eye on what spam is getting through your current filters.