Sorry, but it’s true. You cannot get rid of spam on your blog if you only use Aksimet if you get a lot of traffic to your site. Like most bloggers, I enable Aksimet as soon as I launch a new blog. It’s very effective when there’s not much traffic, but as soon as the comment spammers know you’re there, it’s a different story. In my experience, Aksimet alone is not enough. Over the years I have tried a lot of solutions to reduce the amount of spam I have to look at. Here are some of the combinations I have tried.

Aksimet and Simple Spam Filter

Simple Spam Filter made a great addition to Aksimet. Created by Joe Tan, the plug-in runs a couple of tests to get rid of all the obvious spam, cutting down on the amount you actually have to see. Unfortunately this plug-in has not been updated in a while so there’s no guarantee it will work with the latest version of WordPress.

Replacing Aksimet with Defensio

On some of my blogs, I’ve tried Defensio, an Aksimet alternative which assigns spamminess scores to comments and also allows you to filter comments by category, block malicious content and get rid of profanity. Defensio works pretty well and it’s easy to get rid of red or orange highlighted comments in the admin interface and reduce the amount of spam you need to see. Defensio doesn’t make many errors, though it’s not perfect either.

Other Comment Systems

I’ve tried a number of comment systems in the past year. Some of these integrate with Aksimet, such as IntenseDebate, while others, such as Echo, have their own spam filtering built in. I’ve even tried Mollom, though it stopped some legitimate people from commenting. All of these cut the amount of spam I had to see (Mollom especially) but didn’t improve the commenting experience for my readers.

Aksimet Auntie Spam

Aksimet Auntie Spam is a Firefox extension that sits on top of Aksimet to reduce the amount of spam you have to look at. You see just the first line of a spam comment, which is more than enough to judge whether it is true spam or a false positive, then you can merrily delete the whole queue. Now that Greasemonkey is coming to Chrome, I may use this extension once again.

Aksimet and No-Spam NX

This is my current spam fighting solution. No Spam NX aims to stop spam coming from bots (which on my blog, seems to be most of it). Since I’ve installed the plugin, I have to see very little spam and no one has complained about being unable to comment. For now, this combo seems to work well, so I’ll stick with it. What spam fighting combination do you use on your blog?