SPAM is the bane of my existence. I hate webspam, email spam, snail mail spam.  Most of all, I hate comment SPAM.

The reason I hate comment SPAM the most is because I can’t just delete it all, I have to sift through each message to make sure I’m not deleting a real comment.

Solutions

Let me start off by saying there are a number of amazing solutions out there to eliminate comment spam.  One thing to remember is while we are looking for solutions on how to eliminate SPAM, there are thousands of evil programmers every day trying to figure out how to get it through.

Akismet

Probably the most popular solution.  It is also included by default with most one-click WordPress distributions. The only downside is it is paid.

Captchas

Captchas are great and they work well.  The downside is that they really annoy people.

Switching Comment Systems

Lots of people are now using Disqus and Lifefyre for commenting systems.  We are even starting to see people using G+ comments.  Some folks are using Facebook comments as well.  Whatever the case may be, non-native WordPress commenting systems normally leave your comment’s clean as a whistle.

So what’s this line of code you are talking about?

Well, it’s not just one line of code, its actually about 680 lines of code.  My solution is a plugin called Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin.  It is very simple.  It places a check mark next to the “submit comment” button to ‘prove you are not a SPAMMER.’

The famous line of code:

‘checkbox_alert’ => __(‘Please check the box to confirm that you are NOT a spammer’,’ab_gasp’),

(note: code will only work with the accompanied plugin)

We used to get about 50 SPAM comments per day.  Since we installed the plugin, we have received ZERO.

Sometimes the solutions are so simple, you would have never guessed. This is definitely one of those cases.  Enjoy!