A lot of people like Akismet to block comment spam, but I find (and others have noted) some drawbacks:
- It’s slow.
- It sends information about your visitors to other organizations.
- It tends to reject some legitimate comments, and there’s no way to see what it’s rejected. The stuff just vanishes.
Instead, on every website I develop, I install the small but mighty Antispam Bee plugin by pluginkollektiv.
After you install it, I suggest setting the following options under Settings > Antispam Bee:
- Enable Delete existing spam after X days and provide a reasonable value for X, say, 14 days. That way you don’t have to delete the flagged comments manually, but if there’s a problem, there’s a good chance you can hear about it and look into it before the evidence goes away.
- Enable Delete comments by spam reasons and select Honeypot as the reason. It’s literally impossible for a real human to fail the Honeypot test — they would have to fill text into in a hidden field. With 100% confidence, we don’t need to even clutter up the spam folder with these comments, so this option puts them straight into Trash.
While you’re at it, also consider the plugin Hide Comment Author Link.
And here’s how to deal with a ton of old spam comments from before you installed these plugins.
I will definitely try this later today. It’s great to know that there is something I can do to stop all of the spam and trash! Thanks.