WP-Spamfree is a fantastic free Wordpress plugin that keeps you from getting comment spam from automatic programs (common ones are for male enhancement drugs, online gambling, etc.).
You can get WP-Spamfree here: WP-Spamfree
The simple fact is that as your wordpress blog grows more popular, it will eventually be found by automated bots that will insert spam comments with links to their sites. Their intent isn’t so much to get people to click on their spam links, but rather to increase their search engine ranking by the number of links they’re getting to their site. I’ve literally had hundreds of comment spam links appear on my site overnight.
Let me tell you, deleting those spam comments is a pain. Wordpress gives you some built-in moderation filters to try and prevent it, but alas these guys are used to that and good at getting around them. WP-Spamfree uses some neat tricks to verify if the comment is being made by a person or a robot (using cookies, among other things).
The best part of WP-Spamfree is that it just plain works. There’s no text that the user has to fill in or anything — making a comment is just as simple and easy as if there was no filter at all. It doesn’t put comments in a moderation queue that you have to manually check, and I have never seen a false positive from it. It just detects robots and doesn’t allow their spam comments through. It even includes a little tracker to show you how many spam comments it’s caught. Here’s a shot of the tracker from one of my blogs at the time of this writing:
I have a blog with over 5,000 visits a day. It gets a lot of traffic and used to get a lot of spambots. Since installing WP-Spamfree I haven’t gotten a single automated spam comment. I not only strongly recommend this free Wordpress addon, but I consider it the only addon that is essential for any blog.
Now keeping trolls out of your comments is another matter 
6 Responses
September 21st, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I had a lot of spam problems and wordpress can’t do anything about it. I tried installing this last week and its amazing! Holy cow – 103 blocked spam already! Fantastic!
And good site dude.
October 8th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Hi Brian,
I woke up this morning to about 100 spam bot messages in my Akismet queue. That’s when I starting googling and found your story about WP-Spamfree. I’m just wondering, have you had any problems with false positives?
October 8th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Believe me I’ve been there with the 100 spam comments over night!
There are no false positives per se — the way that it works is by putting an empty cookie on the user’s computer. Since the bots can’t accept cookies, they automatically fail. It’s basically an “are you a real computer” test.
The only restriction is that the user will have to have cookies turned on for it to work – however that’s about 99.9% of users these days since cookies are now used for everything.
I have yet to get any complaints about it from any blogs that I run.
October 26th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I’ve been active on a WordPress site that has SpamFree activated, and have found it to be an abominable pain in the neck. It’s like pulling teeth to get any comments through; virtually everything I write gets flagged as spam. I don’t know what it is about my writing style that apparently looks like spam to SpamFree, but I’m certainly never going to use SpamFree on any of my sites, and have recommended to the administrator of the other site in question that he switch to a different spam protection method.
(Now, let’s see if this comment gets through, or if it gets flagged as spam too…)
October 26th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
It sounds like you’re using a different (or multiple) spam addon, not WP-Spamfree, or possibly have the default wordpress filters set to moderate certain comments. WP-Spamfree does not flag ANYTHING as spam – it doesn’t put them in your moderation queue — just any comment made by a bot never appears on your site at all in any form (they get a rejection notice).
Any comment made by someone on a computer (rather than a botting platform) goes through as normal.
If you are getting comments held for moderation, do the following:
November 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Yeah I installed wp-spamfree on your recommendation and you are spot on. It does not flag comments or hold them for moderation.
I’ve had over 100 spams blocked, and so far no false positives! Every real comment is getting through just fine
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