7 Tools For Fighting Spam In WordPress

No one likes spam – except the spammers themselves, that is. If you’re running a WordPress blog, you probably already have at least one spam control installed, but if you are looking for another layer of protection, we’ve dug up seven great tools for that purpose. Some of these – with a little tweaking – can even fight the pingback spam that seems to be on the rise lately.

As with any WordPress plugins list, we do not recommend you install all of these due to the strain it might put on your hosting account.

Akismet – Akismet (Automattic Kismet) comes bundled with every copy of WordPress, and all you need to do to use it is sign up for an API key with WordPress.com.

Bad Behavior -Bad Behavior works with just about PHP based website to help prevent automated systems from running rampant on your site. This includes things such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal and more.

Defensio.com – A spam filtering plugin that supports Open ID and provides you with an RSS feed of both your “good” and “bad” comments.

Simple CAPTCHA -Adds a CAPTCHA to your comment area to fool the automated comment bots.

Simple Trackback Validation -Trackback spam is a fairly new thing, but it’s been growing rapidly as of late. This plugin attempts to validate the trackbacks you receive, only allowing the seemingly legit ones.

com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/">Spam Karma 2 -Just as the name suggests, this plugin assigns a karma score based on several factors, such as age of the post, the email address, is their a link, and so on. The higher the comment scores, the better. Can also be used to fight the “wrote an interesting post” pingback spam that seems to be everywhere.