I have been using the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin for WordPress for over a month as my primary anti spam system. The plugin is amazingly efficient but over the past few weeks I was seeing a little more spam comments from real users end up in my pending approval section of my WordPress blog.
I did have some suggestions over the last few weeks on how to improve G.A.S.P. and had sent them over to Andy Bailey @commentluv who runs the ComLuv Network and created the highly regarded and incredibly social CommentLuv plugin for WordPress.
In less than two days he had sent me a beta of version of G.A.S.P. 1.1 which included the latest suggestions I had made. These included the ability to analyze comments and mark them SPAM if certain criteria was met.
The first configuration is to set the Maximum number of allowed URL’s in comment text and you can set any # you like. 0 turns off this check but I recommend you set any comment with 2+ URL’s to be auto flagged as SPAM as seldom would any valid commenter leave more than 1 URL in a comment.
The second is to help block KeywordLuv abuse and is limiting the number of words a user can use in the username filed before flagging the comment as SPAM. In this case I recommend 4 or 5, “user @ keyword keyword” or “user @ keyword keyword keyword” is a perfectly acceptable and generous allowance for people to leave comments. I can’t stand when people leave comments which are barely legit with usernames like Bill@The Best Damn Road Show or something completely obnoxious.
Now when you configure these options with Growmap Anti Spambot you can set the comments to go to “Spam” or to your “Pending” area. I highly recommend just to have them sent to spam bucket as they were all ending up in my pending area anyway before the G.A.S.P. plugin had these options.
@Growmap and @Commentluv have done a fantastic job collaborating on putting this WordPress Anti Spam plugin together and I am happy to help contribute suggestions and features to help make it even more effective.
-Dragon Blogger
