Thank you Spam Karma 2

If you have a wordpress blog, and have the usual comment spam issues, I’d recommend checking out Spam Karma 2.

I don’t get a lot of spam on my personal blog because I have comments automatically disable after a few days, however that’s not an option on the wishlisting blog, especially for technical posts that people sometimes stumble upon months later via Google.

Spam Karma is free on commercial blogs (unlike Akismet) and uses a number of cool tricks to figure out whether a post is coming from a legitimate person, including:

  1. How long they spent on the page before submitting a comment
  2. Whether or not they’re using an actual browser (javascript test)
  3. How many links are in the comment and the ratio of links to text
  4. A few other things

It then gives the post a “karma” score. If the karma score is too low (looks like spam) it will give the person a captcha so they have one last shot at proving they’re a human. It’s a pretty sweet idea. Rather than hitting everyone with a captcha, they just use it on particularly suspicious comments which is far less intrusive.

Posts with low karma and a failed captcha get marked as spam, and don’t end up in your moderation queue (although you can get a regular spam report).