Question: WordPress Drive-By Comments – What are Our Options?
Written by Stefan Vervoort on March 29, 2009
After reading this interesting article from WordPress Max, I started thinking about the so-called phenom Drive-By Comments.
What are Drive-By Comments?
If you blog with WordPress as your blogging software and your blog receives quite a few visits and comments a day, you will notice that many of these comments are spam.
We can say 99% of the comments that are made on our blog are useless: they are comments spam. Fortunately, we have Akismet. Akismet picks out many of these spam comments, but it’s not perfect and it won’t catch them all.
I am sure many of you have noticed comments like “Awesome blog, bookmarked!” or “You rock!”. Usually, those are just spam, but your spam software won’t notice them.
Solution?
Is there a solution for this problem? As I am only familiar with Akismet, I don’t know what the other plugins are capable of. Is a solution like Defensio or Spam Karma 2 better in handling those type of comment spam?
Do you know the answer? Please respond!
This article is written by:
Name: Stefan Vervoort
Description: I am Stefan Vervoort, WordPress enthusiast from the Netherlands. I also write for DivitoDesign.
5 Responses
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Hello Stefan,
i have used for a couple of years Spam Karma 2 on a blog of mine, and it works good. I can say it works like Akismet, more or less
Thanks for that very quick reply!
I thought it would work almost the same, however, do you know Spam Karma 2 handle those type of comments better, compared to Akismet?
I am just using them as “activate it and forget it” and i can say they work the same, more or less
A very nice solution imo to filter out the ‘too short’ version of the drive-by comments is made possible by a plugin by Joost de Valk. You can find it here: http://yoast.com/wordpress/minimum-comment-length/
Yes, that a plugin that looks nice and I think it works. At least, for the way-to-short comments, but it doesn’t have a solution for the little longer comments. Plus, I think it hinders real commentators. What do you think?