If I use WordPress Simple Firewall, do I also need to run Akismet?

I don’t run Akismet on any sites and I do okay for spam.

The problem is the bot-based spam, which is what this plugin blocks. It wont do any good against human spam unfortunately, which is what Akismet is supposed to be good against.

Paul. Got ya. Thanks. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, that would be free (or much less expensive than $60 per year) to help with the “human spam”. Any thoughts?

Hey Gary,

If you think about it, there’s nothing really reliable that can be done against human spam… because in effect it is legitimate comments posting. It requires decent content filtering, and you’ll nearly always need to pay for a service of good quality – though I can’t comment on Akismet.

Do you get many human spam comments to your sites? Even with the comments filtering of this plugin?

Actually, off the back of this, I’m thinking of implementing another human-spam based comments filter. I have a few ideas about this and it’ll probably be a couple of weeks before it would be ready for go-live.

Paul,

I am not sure if I get spam from humans or bots. Sometimes they look very close to either or. ??

I guess I was looking for an alternative to Akismet and since they say they also help prevent spam from “humans” .. that’s what I was hoping to find .. meaning an app that would help prevent spam from bots as well as humans .. as Akismet states on their features page https://akismet.com/how/.

Since your WordPress Simple Firewall is so awesome (love it!!) I am excited to see what you can do with the human spam side of things. Please keep me informed.

~ fan of WordPress Simple Firewall ?? Gary

I did a fair bit of work on this over the past few days so I might have something in place this week, fingers-crossed.

Given how Akismet works, there’s no way it can work against bots the way the Simple Firewall does… it’s just different.

As to human spammers though, that’s hard, and the way I’ll try and address might result in few false spam-positives, but there’s no hard and fast way to avoid that.

Thanks for your feedback on the plugin, really delighted to hear you like it. Fancy leaving us a little review to share it with the world? ??
Cheers!
Paul.

Paul,

Thanks!!

Your current WP Simple Firewall (which might be simple to use and implement, but is actually very comprehensive) .. already has a great way to handle “humans” who are entering comments on posts and pages. So I was curious as to what you’re doing that’s going to be different.

I was also confused by your statement of “Given how Akismet works, there’s no way it can work against bots the way the Simple Firewall does… it’s just different.” I was just confused. Sorry.

Gary

Hi Gary,

Thanks for the review… really appreciate that!

I’m going to be adding a blacklist of words that are widely recognised to be present in SPAM comments. You can freely download the list here:
https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment-blacklist

They say you can add this to your WordPress Blacklist settings, but I’ve actually automated the download of the list and also will later add in the ability automatically update it, as the list updates almost daily.

Also, I use a much more efficient scanning method to scan the blacklist so it works a lot better than the native WordPress blacklist scan.

With the additions I’m adding (which I’ll probably release tomorrow) you can:
– choose where automatic bot spam goes to: spam / trash
– choose where human spam goes to: spam / trash
– choose which fields you scan in human spam (author name, email, ip, comment content, user agent)

In this way you can easily separate automatic bot-spam and human spam. I haven’t had ANY false positives for Bot spam, but I imagine human spam scanning will produce false results sometimes… later I’ll build in a custom ignore list for certain keys that produce false results.

As to Akismet, they work by taking your Comment data and sending it out to their servers, they then scan the contents (like I will do with the release tomorrow) and look for bad words. They do not have the support for bot spam filtering which uses local database keys that verify visitors as real people (which I do for my anti-bot-spam). ??

I hope that helps explain it all a bit better.
Cheers,
Paul.

Thanks. Sounds great.

I think the “custom ignore list” will be important. Looking forward to that.

??

Thanks,
Gary

Alrighty, version 2.6.0 is launched with Human spam scanning. ??

It’s not the only thing pushed into this release, so check out the changelog and review your comments filtering settings.

I’m keen to hear your feedback.

As to the ignore list, this will come in a later release…

Cheers!
Paul.

Paul .. please email me at [email protected] so I can send you my comments, etc. via email.

Gary