But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are listed on web pages that pin point nofollow blogs for spamming, splogs regularly repost our content and send us trackbacks and well disguised comments are often adorned with links to completely unrelated sites. Moderating comments takes a lot of effort from all of us (we are working on making this process simpler, stay tuned) and even then, some weirdness and mistakes slip past us. We have recently started noticing a lot of comments that seem mildly relevant but link to SEO sites or completely unrelated content that keeps changing.

Do you change your commenters’ URI often when posting comments? Are you under the impression that leaving comments with different links will give those links more exposure? Do you use Short URLs to get around comment spam restrictions? More importantly, how many of you force yourself to comment to just spread your links around? Have you ever left a comment just to increase your comment count? Are you an SEO professional who regularly comments on blogs for SEO purposes? You might be doing yourself (and us) more harm than good.

While we try our best to allow any and all relevant comments to be posted, we do actively remove suspicious comments. We make spam/spammer judgment calls every day, but spam is annoying and nasty and in my opinion, spam is like a leech that sucks off the goodness and leaves the host with nothing in return. It often clogs up the conversation and reduces relevancy. Just look at the latest comments on any old(er) blog with a popular post that has not been pruned and taken care of.

We do however, actively promote, reward and encourage passionate comments. If you feel that we have missed a comment that should have been posted, please contact us. However, if you are changing your link on every comment and linking to various websites around the internet who have paid you for your SEO services, please do not send us an email asking us to approve them. Mostly, dont be evil and smug!

How do you treat suspicious comments that have not been caught by Akismet? We manually visit every comment waiting for moderation and actively remove suspicious comments and any older ones that might be related. It takes time but it is worth it.

How do you reward your commenters? We use Highlight Author Comments and hacked up versions of various plugins for heuristics.

Do you import comments from other places on the web? No. We do not import comments from anywhere. The conversation is much more focused and we concentrate on quality versus quantity. We hope that our content, subject and demeanor encourage and crystallize commenting and participation. Other conversations about our posts on apps such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter add nothing but noise wherein the real conversation in live comments get drowned out. I used to think that Trackbacks belonged in the comment flow. I have since changed my opinion after dealing with some posts with hundreds of comments.

Do you turn off comments on old posts? No. Old posts are gems. Conversations can get started on old topics and need to be allowed.

What do you do?

Yawasp (Yet Another WordPress Anti-Spam Plugin) is one such plugin that uses an innovative approach to battle comment spam.

Description

Most anti-comment-spambot-plugins focus on user interaction, e.g. captcha or math comment spam protection. Yawasp focuses on handling comment-spam-protection within WordPress. It replaces the names of the comment form fields with random names, protecting your blog from spambots that aim at the default comment field names. Furthermore it adds a blank field, hidden from the user, that needs to be left empty. In addition, the random field names are changed every 24 hours, giving a spambot no chance to adapt to the comment form.

Features

• Does not require JavaScript, Cookies or Sessions
• No extra field for user input (e.g. Captcha) required
• False-positives are nearly impossible
• No need to manage spam comments anymore
• Easy installation (automatic or manual)

Installation

The installation is more complicated than other plugins as it requires deal of manual intervention (in case the automatic editing fails). Upload the plugin and activate it.

Make the necessary changes in your theme files if necessary and you’re good to go.

The plugin will display the number of spambots blocked on the dashboard.

Review

This plugin is another attempt to protect your blog from spam. However, I still don’t think that this is the first and last stop for protecting your blog.

For one, it only attempts to stop automated spambots attacking your comment form.

And it cannot protect you against manual comment spammers and trackback/pingback spam. Hence, you’d require another plugin like Akismet to form your secondary defense.

I recommend using this plugin if you have been able to identify that your primary amount of spam is spambots attacking your site. By installing this plugin, you’ll notice that with these spambots blocked, you’ll be required to take a look at a much smaller amount of spam in your spam queue.

What I would like to see is what spam is actually blocked by the plugin. The plugin does store which spambots are blocked over a 24 hour period, which works well. However, you won’t see any of the comments blocked.

In case your visitors start to report being blocked, you’ll need to check your comments.php to see if the code is properly installed. I suggest making a few test comments as well getting a few friends to test it out. From my experience, a lot of commenters will just not bother informing you in case they face problems commenting on your site.

So, which antispam plugins do you use? If you’re already using Yawasp, what has been your experience so far? What features would you like to see added?