Early in August I installed a Wordpress plugin called Spam Karma 2 on all of my blogs. I had been getting an increasing amount of comment spam. My blogs were all set to semi-moderation — the first comment you make to the blog would be moderated but, once approved, you could comment freely. Going through each individual spam comment on three blogs was getting tedious and time-consuming. When I inadvertently deleted some legitimate comments from one post, I decided I needed to start investigating plugins.
A version of Akismet is installed by default with Wordpress. I’ve read mixed opinions of the plugin, but the fact that it requires you to register with Wordpress.com and get an API key turned me off. All of my blogs currently qualify for the free license, but I really don’t like registering for software unless I’m paying for it (it’s just a pet peeve of mine). Another thing that turned me off about Akismet is that it is an external service. When comments are made they are transmitted from your blog to the Aksimet service where they are tested, then the results are returned to the plugin on your blog. No thanks. I’d prefer a plugin that does the work locally.
Somewhere in the blogosphere I stumbled across some glowing reviews of Spam Karma (if I could remember where I saw them I’d link to them). So I hit the SK2 site, read more about it, visited the maintainer’s blog, and decided to give it a whirl. I believe I read somewhere that SK2’s filtering is implemented via a genetic algorithm, which appeals to me as a game programmer and was another reason I decided to try it. I can’t find now where I read that, but I’m sure I did. The plugin has a complex set of configurable options that affect how it rates each comment, but I haven’t tweaked them yet.
It’s been over a month since I installed Spam Karma 2. When I did, I turned off comment moderation completely. I have yet to see any spam get through the filter. Only once did a legitimate comment get marked as spam and that was because it was very wordy and contained a great many links (on this blog actually). The plugin emails me regularly with updates on how much spam was caught since the last update. Every few days I enter the admin panel on each blog and scan through the filtered spam to check for any legitimate comments. It’s very fast, easy to mark multiple comments as legitimate, or to delete multiple spam comments in a single go. The plugin will delete all spam it catches after 30 days, but I tend to do it manually anyway. Like I said, it’s really easy. A two click process deletes several at once. The genetic algorithm is designed to learn when you mark comments legitimate so that it doesn’t make the same mistake again.
My gamedev blog is really putting the plugin through the paces. The amount of comment spam there was steadily increasing when I installed the plugin, but in the past month there has been an explosion. SK2 has caught every single one and not made a mistake yet. I still can’t believe something like this is free, so Dr. Dave is going to get a donation from me as soon as I clear out my credit card. SK2 has saved me a huge amount of time and I recommend it to any blogger looking to solve the comment spam problem.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Spam Karma, comment spam, Wordpress plugins
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