At various times over the past few years I’ve used Akismet and Defensio to block comment spam. I’m now trying Mollom and I’m pleased with the early results.
The problem with Akismet and Defensio is they sometimes block genuine comments. Manual checking is the only way to find out.
On days when my sites are flooded with spam, that has meant scanning through up to 100 comments.
Mollom takes a different approach and refers potentially dodgy comments to a CAPTCHA challenge. If the visitor is human the comment will get through; if not it’s banished.
When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s intelligent text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is ham or spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure will never block human users, and it allows us to set very tight spam filters and prevent almost all spam from getting through.
This takes the hassle out of comment screening.
The service is free for up to 100 legitimate comment posts per day, and even with The Border Watch I’m unlikely to face that dilemma.
Another problem I had with the newspaper site was comment notification. I use a plugin because the inbuilt WordPress system doesn’t work for some reason I have never established.
The plugin notifies me of all comments held for moderation, including spam until Mollom.
Since installing Mollum I have only received email alerts for genuine comments. The stats show that 14 comments have been seamlessly blocked here and 10 at The Border Watch in less than a day without me needing to check them.
