Fighting Comment Spam without Akismet

Disclaimer : I don’t have any biased feeling towards Akismet. Any claims made in this post are purely factual. I had written an article earlier stating that Akismet does not work as it supposed to. I was referring to the intelligence factor in the linked article while today, I emphasize that Akismet alone is not sufficient for bloggers. Akismet can handle limited number of spam and nowhere close to comprehensiveness. Here’s some history : I am regularly getting spammed by the same set of spamming robots and no help is being offered by the world’s most popular anti-spam comment plugin. It’s time for me to look elsewhere and provide a holistic view of the situation and review some of the spam preventing plugins. The first plugin I am planning on experimenting with, is the Math Comment Spam Protection . It is a simple plugin that asks the user to perform basic addition of two numbers and provide the answer. Sounds simple! Installation is simple and involves adding code into your template, and the plugin works as it’s supposed to (at least with the addition). The plugin is installed on this blog on a pilot basis and here are my two concerns: - What if the spamming robots are developed to perform addition? - What if a user cannot perform simple addition (using a calculator is an option though) Results matter the most and the best judge is time and I expect some good amount of spam to hit me in the next 7 days. Too sad, I wouldn’t know if the plugin actually prevented spam or not. Either way, if I don’t get spammed over a period of time, then the plugin is worth it; at least for now. I will update this post probably within a week with my results. If you have found a better workable solution, let us know. If you have a plugin which you would like us to test, do let us know.