The second type are ping and trackback spammers. This is either done by auto-posting articles that others have written without their consent on so called autoblogs. Each post generates at least one pingback to the original site. This can lead to hundreds of pingbacks over time which many webmasters and blog owners publish.

The third and most spammy type are the automated spammers that use specifically designed tools to spam thousands of blogs, forums and every other type of site where content can be posted in hours. Now that we know the different types of spammers we have to discuss how to handle them. This post will mostly deal with automated spammers who post dozens if not hundreds of comments and pingbacks.

Webmasters should use at least one anti-spam tool to block the majority of spam reaching the frontend of the website. Wordpress users can for example use Akismet or one of the several other anti-spam plugins that are available. Still, some spam will come through. Today for example a webmaster decided to copy and post more than 300 articles from Ghacks on a website. Each post generated at least one pingback, many multiple pingbacks as the tags and links were kept by that webmaster.

Akismet did not object to these ping and Ghacks ended up with more than 300 accepted and published pings from that blog. Many webmasters would now delete them one by one which takes quite a while. A far better solution is to filter for a common denominator which in this case was the url of the website. All comments, pings and trackbacks that include the domain name of that website were listed giving me the option to mark them all and send them to the spam folder.

There might be situations where this is not possible. Maybe the website or script does not offer the option to bulk moderate comments. There is however another option if the website is making use of a database. This does however require some knowledge about the database as a query has to be run in the administration. Most users will probably use MySql where a basic delete query looks like this:

delete from [table] where [column name] = 'value'

To delete all comments from a specific url in Wordpress one would do the following:

delete from wp-comments where comment_author_url ='www.example.com'

It is possible to use other table columns like the commenters IP or email for example. How do you handle mass spam to your website or blog?

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Other concerns were that Akismet was not really a free anti spam plugin as webmasters who made more than $500 per month had to order a commercial version for $55 a year. The last concern was probably the most important one as data is send to Akismet servers including the commenter’s IP, user agent or referrer.

One of the main advantages of Antispam Bee is that it does not have to communicate with external servers for the anti spam protection. It is an all in one solution that detects spam not only in comments but also in trackbacks and pings.

The anti spam plugin runs out of the box after activation in the Wordpress interface unlike Akismet which requires the Wordpress api key. A few options of the free anti spam plugin can be configured in the Wordpress settings. Antispam Bee will delete spam messages automatically when they are detected. This can be changed to mark them as spam and keep them for a limited time in the Wordpress spam folder. Great for the first time of usage to monitor the performance of the anti spam software.

The main benefits of using Antispam Bee are twofold. It does increase the privacy of the users who comment on the blog as it does not submit data to third party servers which in turn reduces system resource usage which could be noticeable for blogs that receive many spam comments per day (Ghacks receives about a thousand a day).

We have been testing Antispam Bee for the last days and like the performance and spam detection rate a lot. Only one legit comment was flagged as spam by the anti spam plugin. Even better was the fact that comments from users who were usually flagged as spammers (jojo for example) were not moved to the spam folder at all.

Antispam Bee can be downloaded from the website of the developer. The Wordpress plugin itself is multi-lingual (at least German and English).

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