In starting a WordPress blog, one of the first plugins I would install is an anti-spam plugin.

I had used SI Captcha Anti-Spam in one of my websites and it worked alright initially till a few months back when I started receiving spam comments.

At first, I received just a few a day and it wasn’t a problem getting rid of them. However, the spam comments became more frequent and ran up to more than a hundred in a few days.

Apparently SI Captcha Anti-Spam was not doing a good job of filtering those comments and dumping them into the spam folder.

A Replacement

The increasing number of spam comments was getting to me and I began searching for a better anti-spam plugin.

No blogger wants a load of spam comments that can potentially jeopardize his website database.

There are of course many anti-spam WordPress plugins out there but I fiinally settled on Akismet.

Result

It’s been a few months now since I used Akismet.

The day it was installed in my website, I no longer received irritating spam comments, including those in gibberish language. I have since abandoned SI Captcha Anti-Spam.

I could immediately experience the difference in results (using Akismet and SI Captcha Anti-Spam). 

Akismet place all spam comments into the spam folder. You can choose between letting Akismet to discard comments for you or place them into the spam folder for review before you discard unwanted comments yourself.

Just go to the Akismet settings and you would see the options as below :

Best Anti-Spam WordPress Plugin

I can’t say Akismet is the best anti-spam WordPress plugin, except that it has worked very well for me so far.

There is another plugin – WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam – which is another free anti spam WordPress plugin to help ward off unwelcomed spam comments.

Apparently, it can manage spam in comments, registration/sign-up forms, trackbacks and pingbacks. It can even help you with those recalcitrant spammers and lets you blacklist them to prevent spam comments from flooding your website’s database.

As I don’t use registration or sign-up forms in my website, I am not using WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam in this website.

However, I might install it in one of my other websites in replace of SI Captcha Anti-Spam, and provide my take on it in another post.