After I moved my blog to self-hosting, it has attracted more and more spam. It started slow and very manageable. After my last blog post it got really bad. What started as a few spam messages a week, culminated with 30-40 spam comments per day. At that point I had completely lost any ability to sort through it.

‘I was so disheartened by this that blogging didn’t happen as I knew I had to solve this first. I thought solving it required paying for Akismet and that annoyed me. I pay for my hosting and domain and so forth, but paying just to get rid of comments meant to abuse my blog felt wrong especially as the blog does not have that much traffic that it felt reasonable to have to filter spam.

I knew I had to do something this weekend and after just a little bit of googling I had seen a few recommendations for Anti-Spam by Webvitaly. After reading up it seemed like a very promising option. Since spam engines does not do JavaScript, it places a hidden field on  the comment form and the populates it with the correct answer when someone submits a comment, but the spam engines puts no or bad data in it so the comment is just ignored.

After installing it 36 hours ago, it has filtered out 60 comments and not let through a single spam comment. I say it does the trick for what I need. I can go back to blogging about Oracle and other technologies I fancy, instead of being forced to deal with spam comments.

If you need to filter spam and be able to not even review them, based on my experience this far I’d definitely recommend you to look at this plug-in.