If you use WordPress for your blog or CMS and experience a lot of comment/trackback spam even with Akismet, you may want to check out a new plug-in, Comment Timeout.
I added Comment Timeout to my site because Akismet was not catching some obvious trackback spam. Also, I was getting tired of checking my queue and see hundreds of obvious spam and wondering why they could not be deleted instantly & automatically in WordPress. Akismet doesn’t delete the spam for 15 days. Why wait two weeks? Get rid of it now. Comment Timeout does just this with the following options
- Reject all comments that contain BBCode links (WordPress does not normally use BBCode so genuine comments are very unlikely to contain these, although they are common in spam comments)
- Reject all comments that contain more than X hyperlinks
- Reject comments when the user agent differs from the original page request
And like that, zero comment/trackback spam. Comment Timeout has even more options than those listed above. You can also close comments by how old the post is or by how many days have passed since the last comment to name just two. If you’re on Wordpress, check out Comment Timeout.