Product Announcement: Comment Guard Lite - Lightweight, Super-Fast Comment Spam Protection for WordPress Blog

We are about to release a new blog (WordPress) comment spam protection software. It has been extensively tested for over two months. We will deploy it first across our network of highly popular blogs. The new software named Comment Guard Lite was developed after gaining extensive experience with the leading Comment spam protection software - Comment Guard Pro. Comment Guard Lite provides super-fast (no database access required to identify spam) comment spam protection with zero false positives (no valid comment will be discarded as spam).

Why comment spam protection by Comment Guard Lite is faster?

Most comment spam software (like Akismet or Bad Behaviour or even Comment Guard Pro which however tries to minimize database access for performance) uses the database and executes one or more queries and DML’s (Insert, Update, Delete statements).While this may not matter much in a tiny blog, it can consume significant CPU cycles and memory in professional blogs serving millions of viewers per month and getting bombarded with comment spam as a result of its popularity.Why waste your CPU & RAM for nasty spammers when the same can be used to serve  more vieweres and provide a faster experience?

Additionally many like Akismet also relies on connecting to Akismet server (for every single comment), sending your full comment details (lots of data) and getting the result (spam or ham) from the server, thereby consuming your bandwidth and slowing down the response.

Even moderately popular blogs can get millions of hits per month because of continuous access by search engine crawlers and myriad other crawlers on the web. While serving pages can be cached to some extent (search our blog for more articles on this topic), processing the comments cannot be cached and consumes your resources for thousands of spams you may be getting every day. Not only that but you also have to spend your valuable time looking over many comments daily, which are obviously spam.

Comment Guard Lite excels in differentiating humans from spam-bots

Comment Guard Lite uses a novel and innovative technology to verify the human-ness of the comment poster without imposing any load on the server. The simplicity of the approach allows us to process several thousands of comments per second without consuming significant processor cycles.

Comment Guard Pro uses over 20 pluglets to idenitfy spams, one of which is a pluglet named “Are you human?” which does the same thing. Comment Guard Lite simplifies this check and eliminates the need to maintain sessions.

Simple and Focused approach to comment spam prevention

The strength of Comment Guard Lite is its focussed approach to comment spam protection. It primarily does one thing and does it very well - verify the human-ness of the commenter.

Comment Guard Lite doesn’t expect bloggers to know nothing more than how to activate a plugin (and even that will be clearly explained). Beyond that all he can do (aside from blogging) is to watch in disbelief as his spams reduce dramatically and his server breathes a sigh of relief from the reduced load.

Note: Comment Guard Lite also protects your from pingback and trackback spam (to give comprehensive comment spam protection) but those implementations are simplistic and can be achieved by other plugins too.

Comment spam protection can be layered

Our goal is to enable you and make you more efficient and not to box you into any paradigm or software. As a result Comment Guard Lite can be used with almost any other comment spam protection software like Akismet or Bad Behaviour or Comment Guard Pro (needs Are you human pluglet to be disabled as this job is done by Comment Guard Lite).

Comment Guard Lite or Comment Guard Pro?

Unlike Comment Guard Pro (features), Comment Guard Lite will not provide the ability to write customizable rules in pluglets or provide an Open API (Developer Guide).

Comment Guard Pro is a comprehensive comment spam prevention software with over 20 rules covering all the different types or spam and will provide more comprehensive coverage against comment spam. Comment Guard Pro is inherently customizable and allows you to customize the business rules and parameters used to identify spam.

Unfortunately many bloggers may not have the time, inclination or expertise to leverage the full power of Comment Guard Pro.

Comment Guard Lite takes a critical piece of Comment Guard Pro functionality (human-ness identification with certainity), improves upon it, simplifies it, makes it faster by a simpler but accurate algorithm and eliminates database access or sessions.

Comment Guard Lite doesn’t replace Comment Guard Pro and both can be in a complementary fashion on the same blog to leverage the low resource usage and fast performance of Comment Guard Lite to handle most of your spammers (over 90-95%) while using the comprehensive comment check provided by Comment Guard Pro, which can even identify human spammers, for the rest and provide more control over your comments. Comment Guard Lite with Comment Guard Pro is like two brothers who will look over your blog day and night, fight spammers while approving genuine commenters without requiring your intervention, however appreciating it and using it when you can provide some input. Read here for more details on Comment Guard Pro software.

When will Comment Guard Lite be available?

Comment Guard Lite will be available from July, 2009. It will be priced at 30$. However we will provide a limited time discounted price of 20$ only for the month of July.

Comment Guard Lite - A simple, pluggable comment spam protection software that respects your readers

Comment Guard Lite can be used as a standalone product or integrated with your existing comment spam protection system, a simple light-weight plugin which allows you to focus on doing what you do best - blogging.

It ensures that no valid comments from your readers are lost. It treats your readers with respect and it will never give snarky messages to your valuable readers (like Bad Behavior). Comment Guard Lite will never ask your readers to fill any demeaning and often hard-to-read CAPTCHA’s and waste their time.