Best Plugin to Stop Automated Spam?

[Fabio]

Hey there,
it has been a long time since my last question, hope you're all very well 🙂

I get loads of automated spam every day. Based on your experience what's the best plugin to stop automated spam?
Some people say akismet doesn't work very well anymore, so yeah it would be nice to have some up-to-date feedback about what you're using and the results you get.

Thanks a lot
Fabio

[AnitaC]

Hi @Fabio, yes I haven't seen you on the forum in quite a long time. I use Akismet on all of my projects and client sites. It works perfectly fine for me. Not sure why others say it doesn't work. Give Akismet a try for yourself. When you first install it, it take a day for it to be active for it to "familiarize" the content on your website. After that, it should be fine.

---

Need help with customization or troubleshooting? Reach out to me.

[Summer]

Akismet cannot be the be-all end-all only comment spam plugin you use anymore because it hasn't adapted to the new ways the spammers use to bombard sites. Even the .htaccess recipe to stop comment spammers stopped being as effective about 3 years ago, and is nigh on useless nowadays.

I've been using Akismet since about 2 weeks after it first came out... I've seen how it's performance and accuracy has degraded over the years, and no, it's not fine anymore, especially now that they are making money from it and it isn't being significantly improved. Made to have shinier bells & whistles in the dashboard, sure, but performance at just doing what it's supposed to do, it hasn't kept up with the spammers, and no amount of cheerleading from anyone is ever going to make me a blind believer again.

Two of my biggest sites started getting slammed about 6 weeks ago or so, to the tune of 1000-1500 spams per day landing in my spam queue (and yes, this was even with Akismet's new silent discard feature turned on).

The other two helper plugins I had alongside Akismet were overwhelmed and not stopping the flood anymore, and I came very close to just turning off comments for a few days until the flood subsided, I was that fed up.

I found another plugin, WP Spamshield, and it's been a wonder. The spams still flood in, but I never see them, I just see the stats that say it's still blocking about 500 spams per day (which is about double what those sites had been getting the previous year).

So now I just have Akismet and WP Spamshield together on those two sites, and things are good again, and I'm testing out Spamshield alone on one smaller less trafficked site... but IMO I don't think Akismet will ever again be the single sole comment spam solution, and maybe no one plugin can be anymore... and maybe that's also a good thing.

---

WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Fabio]

Hey Anita and Summer 🙂
Thank you very much for your reply 🙂

I will try SpamShield first and see how it goes 🙂

Fabio

[Fabio]

Hey so far spamshield alone is working great already 🙂
Thanks!

Let's hope it keeps doing well

[Author]

Posts