There is a(n) (informal) saying in India that goes, ‘Before a new law is formed, ways to circumvent it are created in advance‘. This has been quite right in the case of spammers too. Albeit they didn’t get ways beforehand after a technology was introduced to fight their methods. It was after the introduction that the spammers were almost always working on finding ways to ‘get around’.

Anyway, I found one thing when I first started using WordPress an year ago. There are a million bots out there which are waiting for you to expose a form over the internet. That’s all they need to start their work! After getting emails for comment moderation by the hundreds, I searched and found Akismet (keeping in mind the fact that I was new to WordPress at that time). I activated Akismet and then found the result was pretty good. Akismet did keep a lot of them out. But, eventually, it did let quite many in.

So, I searched again. This time I found another great WordPress Plugin called SpamKarma 2. This was really good. I activated it and then deactivated Akismet just to make sure the two don’t fight with each other like Freddie and Jason and harm the users of the blog like the hapless teenagers in my favorite movie. But, it worked good upto sometime and then it also slipped a couple of times. Damn! Those spammers are smarter than I thought.

So, I search yet again. This time I found BadBehavior Plugin. This plugin blocks unusual or unconventional ways of accessing your site. So, I put it up and activated it on my blog. Next thing you know I turned on the Akismet plugin. So my blog is now running these anti-spam plugins: Akismet, BadBehavior and SpamKarma 2.

Oh yeah, I found another useful plugin (although how effective it is, is yet to be ascertained!) called Simple Trackback Validation. This plugin makes sure that the trackbacks posted on your articles are genuine and belong to pages that contain links back to the article in question.

So, the plugins running on my WordPress blog at the moment are: Akismet, BadBehavior, SpamKarma2 and Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

I hope this article will guide you with the necessary ways to fight Spammers. I have benefited from following these guidelines and you will too. Even though after installing so many plugins, you may not be able to filter 100% spams but it sure helps to be on the safe side. Trust me you wouldn’t want to receive comment moderation email alerts a hundred/thousand times.

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