How To Block Spam Without Using Akismet

This post is going to give you the resources you need to block spam comments and trackbacks on your WordPress blog without having to use Akismet to do it.

Firstly however lets talk about what happens if you use Akismet to handle your comments and trackbacks.

Firstly What Is Happening With Akismet

Akismet is a useful tool in the right hands but what has been happening with all the hype surrounding spam comments and spam trackbacks is that if other bloggers do not like what you have added to their post by way of your comment you can end up being flagged as a spammer on the Aksimet web server.

And they do this simply by clicking on the spam link below your comment as illustrated below.

Once you do this what happens is that you click is then recorded and placed into the Akismet web server where it is then processed as a spam comment.

However after reading the Akismet FAQ page they also state that if you think you made a mistake marking a comment as spam you can also then simply go back to that comment and approve it.

I don’t know how you handle comment spam., but once I make the decision not to allow the comment I delete it, so for me the option to recover the comment and remove it from the Akismet spam filter has already passed.

Many are doing this without really knowing or understanding what the implications are to the commentator such as being blacklisted in the Aksimet web server where all their future comments are treated as spam.

If you want to know more about this then check out this post Growmap’s blog Akismet Deletes Comments Bloggers Never See…

You Should Have Control Of Your Online Community Not Akismet

You have to remember one thing when creating a blog: it is your online community and the people who visit and comment on your blog are the ones that are helping you to succeed online.

Why would you want them to post a comment on your site only for them to see a blank white screen appear, which then can lead to you continuously receiving emails with people saying that they are not able to post comments on your site. What a fantastic way to get visitors to never view your site again.

So as you can see by allowing this to happen you are potentially losing customers from your site by making their experience an uncomfortable one. It is in your business interest not to let others control it for you…

So How Can You Set Up Your WordPress Blog Without Using Aksimet And Block Spam?

Over the past month we have been testing different WP plugins to see what will best suit our needs in regards to comment spam as well as trackback spam and we have come up with some additional plugins that will not simply make your comments disappear without you ever seeing them but will also eliminate all the  unwanted comment and trackback spam without putting extra work onto you.

The first WordPress plugin that we are going to suggest you use is Si CAPTCHA . Once this is installed and setup your commentators will simply need to enter a code to then have their comment submitted into moderation or published immediately depending on your own blog preferences.

The Si CAPTCHA options page is very easy to use and understand. The only thing we needed to change was the setting for the difficulty level. The default is set to medium and we changed that to high.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the options panel is very easy to understand and has additional options such as activating the CAPTCHA on the log-in page of WordPress as well, which we did not need to use.

One Problem Remained However

Once We Disabled Akismet…”Trackback Spam”

This was a problem that was very easily solved with another free WordPress plug-in called Simple Trackback Validation. This is a very useful plugin that stops a lot of your trackback spam.

What Is Trackback Spam?

Trackback spam is virtually the same as comment spam but has the ability to get around some of the safeguards that spam filters put in place. And for those that do not know what a trackback is, it is simply an automatic acknowledgment which is sent over the Internet indicating that another blog has linked to you.

The Simple Track Validation Plugin is very easy to set up on your WordPress blog with the default settings being enough to stop virtually all trackback spam – at least for our site anyway.

Hopefully this post has given you another alternative to consider when selecting which plugins are right for your WordPress blog and online business. We are not saying that there is anything wrong with using Akismet, but it was not suitable to our needs.

We want to be in control of what happens on our site so we decided to join other Business Friendly DoFollow Blogs who are not using Akismet. If you have found other plugins that can be just as effective as the ones we have mentioned above please join in our discussion.

You might also want to check out Comment Luv Premium as a way to get quality comments and block spammers.

You may want to test to find out if you have been flagged as a spammer by Aksimet. You might also be interested in our post on How To Avoid Twitter Spam.