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One of the emerging problems in today’s blog market is spam commenting. I start seeing more and more comments like “Nice site”, “Good Luck with your Blog” and other like this. No valuable comment or insight or opinion from a guest visitor. So what’s the solution now? Disallow comments? Force users register? Approve comments?

You cannot disallow comments, you will lose the social/interactivity part of your blog. Each real comment is like a smaller article which gives a start for the next comment, and so on. People start commenting about your article and end up commenting about some other opinions in other people comments. That’s more content for your article for Google to index. It’s like other people help you writing a full article, not just your opinion.

Approve comments and you’ve got the whole day busy. What if you have a 3000 articles blog? Will you read and approve hundreds and maybe thousands of comments daily? This works only for small or new blogs, but otherwise it’s not an intelligent idea.

We have 2 more possibilities:

Force user register. A spammer will not register just to post a link and two or three words. But you will lose the spontaneity of a comment. It’s like a visitor wants to say something about your article and when he reaches the bottom of the page he is required to register. And afterwards, maybe to verify his registration clicking on a link in his email box. If you exclude verification, you’ll end up with literally hundreds of spam bot members. I know this because I have 5 forums and I had this problem with them.

Anti-spam plug-ins. This plug-ins help you filter out spam comments. Let’s see some of them. The following are WordPress-related.

We have this list: Top 10 WordPress Anti Spam Plugins by Jonathan Clarke and another 3 anti-spam solutions.

Akismet is the best so far. Akismet, or Automattic Kismet, is a spam filtering service created by Automattic and released on October 25, 2005, the corporation which employs most of the main developers of the weblog platform WordPress. Akismet attempts to filter link spam from blog comments and spam TrackBack pings. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating blogs, and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet has captured one billion spam comments and pings as of March 2007. Read more here.

Related:

Read this article about combating comment spam, straight from WordPress.
Jason Blanton article about comments and spam.