All WordPress bloggers know about Akismet plugin that detects both manual and bot spammers posting comments on WordPress, also give you choice to set auto deletion of spam comments, there are its free feature; it also gives you some premium plans you can purchase from its site Akismet.Com. This article is about another plugin that also may become a good alternative of Akismet if you give it a try. We are discussing about Defensio Anti-Spam.
Defensio Anti-Spam is an another advanced filtering web service for spam and malicious content. It learns and adapts from your behaviors and those of your users. In addition to simple spam filtering it also provides you world-class malicious content detection, profanity filtering, URL categorization, script detection and more. Excluding this it includes some advanced features like support for OpenID, detailed statistics, charts and counter widget etc. (view screenshots here)
Installation & Usage:
- It aims to be all-in-one anti-spam solution and hence using it with other anti-spam plugins might cause some errors for you. So before installing it you need to deactivate Akismet or any other similar plugin.
- Now search for Defensio Anti-Spam plugin from Plugins -> Add New page of your admin area dashboard. Install and activate Defensio Anti-Spam.
- Under the Plugins tab you will find a new tab ‘Defensio Configuration’, click it and now you have to enter your API key. You can obtain one API key (free) following this address: http://defensio.com/signup. After you enter your API key, if the key turns green it means it has been successfully validated.
That’s all. Your WordPress website is now under the protection of Defensio’s enhanced spam filtering web service. From now on wards all comments posted to your website would be getting analyzed by Defensio and attributed a “spaminess” value that helps you sort and manage your Quarantine. Under your blog’s Comments tab, the quarantine has been re-labelled as “Defensio Spam”.