Stop Comment Spam With Spam Free WordPress

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Todd Lahman recently contacted me about his new plugin Spam Free WordPress which promises to be the only comment spam blocking plugin that blocks 100% of the automated spam with zero false positives. He initially released the plugin as a premium plugin however he has since released the plugin for free.

In order to test the plugin on WP Mods, Todd advised me to disable all other comment spam plugins including Akismet so that I get the best results. Over the last week I have been using Spam Free WordPress on WP Mods and it seems to work really well. WP Mods hasn’t really had a major problem with comment spam as most comments from spam scripts got caught by Akismet and placed in the spam folder. Every now and then a few would slip through though but that hasn’t happened as yet with Spam Free WordPress (admittedly, 7 days isn’t really a long enough time to test a plugin of this nature).

The plugin uses an anonymous password authentication to prevent comment spam. Every post is assigned a secret password. It is only generated after the first time someone visits the page and a new password is generated after every comment. I much prefer this to the CAPTCHA system, which regularly frustrates visitors with images that are impossible to read.

The plugin has a local blacklist though you can link to an external blacklist file as well. This is useful for blocking IP addresses of known spammers.

I had Spam Free WordPress installed for about 5 days. I then went back to using Akismet to see if I noticed any major differences and then reactivated Spam Free WordPress again (version 1.3.7). As I mentioned previously, 7 days isn’t a long time to test a plugin nature of this kind. I am however fairly impressed with the number of comments it is blocking. Whether Spam Free WordPress is the plugin to replace Akismet, only time will tell, however it seems to be a real contender and I see no reason for me not to keep using it for the foreseeable future.

I encourage you all to try it out if you are having problems with comment spam.

Thanks,
Kevin

Spam Free WordPress: Information | Download

About Kevin Muldoon

Kevin Muldoon is a Scottish webmaster and blogger who currently lives in Bogota, Colombia. He has an unhealthy obsession with trying out new WordPress themes and plugins and spends too much time in the WordPress Forums.

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