24 July 2008 - 9:19amWP-SpamFree at last

For the last few weeks I’ve been getting 15-25 spam comments per day on my blog.  I have had Akismet installed since the beginning, but I was getting tired of having to clear the queue on a daily basis.  I went looking for a better option and found the WP-SpamFree plugin.  WP-SpamFree uses some complicated JavaScript and who knows what else to make it very difficult for a spambot to post a comment (I haven’t looked at the source and the description of how it works was very vague).  As I understand it, the plugin can’t possibly block a real human from posting, since the logic used only affects bots (because of this, all spam comments are just deleted, there’s no queue to sift through).  Since this is a “front-end” spam blocker, you have to deactivate any other “front-end” spam blockers, such as captchas, but you can leave “back-end” spam blockers, such as Akismet, active (though the plugin’s author says it won’t be necessary).  So far, the plugin has blocked about 10 spam comments and nothing has slipped through to Akismet.

In addition to WP-SpamFree, I also installed WP Super Cache and AJAXed WordPress.  WP Super Cache adds caching functionality to WordPress to reduce the load on the server when pages are requested (by creating static HTML pages to serve up instead).  So far it’s working quite well.  AJAXed WordPress adds some awesome AJAX to WordPress if you have the time to modify your theme to accomodate it (there’s only like two things active out of the box, the rest require theme modification).  I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but there’s a lot of potential.