Cutting Out Blog Spam

This website is amongst the heaviest hit in regards to comment spam, at least when considering my personal blogs. The other day I implemented recaptcha on this website to hopefully get to the point where I could allow instant approval of comments here. . . but there’s still an issue with comment spam.

Before I implemented recaptcha, I would receive anywhere from 20-60 “comments” for various posts on this blog, and those are only the blog comments that made it through my Wordpress comment blacklist; I can’t imagine how many notifications I would have received had I not maintained a comment blacklist.

What’s amazing to me is the significant increase of blog spam, a year ago I was getting a few spam comments a week to today when it’s averaging 40 per day, even with the use of a blacklist.

Once I installed recaptcha, I opened up my Wordpress admin and allowed for instant-approval of certain emails. . . within 5 hours I had 13 illegitimate spam comments approved on my blog here. Now, in all fairness, recaptcha isn’t designed to eliminate spam, rather its purpose is to add an “extra step” in the spam commenting process, thus providing a time-consuming inconvenience for those who are looking for a free backlink for their online pharmacy and PPC websites through automated blog comment posting.

If anybody has a sure-fire way to eliminate 95% or more of the spam comments while allowing for instant posting of comments on a Wordpress blog, I would love to hear from you.