WordPress Comment Spam Protection: Comment Guard Plugin Beta Release

Update: Comment Guard pro has been released. Please check the features here.

I am happy to announce the release of Comment Guard Plugin (0.2 Beta) for beta testing¹.

Comment Guard plugin (for WordPress) unobtrusively prevents robotic spam² (which accounts of over 99% of your spam) without causing any problem for humans. Humans will not feel any difference at all.

Additionally it also stops cold certain well-known human spamming³ techniques like link stuffing in the current release.

Comment spam has become a serious problem for popular blogs because it is very easy to automate it and inundate hundreds of thousands of blogs in a very short period of time. Comment spams pollutes your blog, removes your Google rank donation capacity, and forces you to advertise others products on your blog for free.

Comment Guard plugin was born after years of frustration with other popular spam prevention plugins like Akismet, Bad Behaviour or Spam Karma. They were either ineffective or too strict and even denied valid comments. In short they are a pain in the arse for genuine commenters and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam). They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database. I wanted to have none of that.

Comment Guard is also unique in that it is pluggable. You can write your own plugins to add more spam prevention technique, gather more statistics and anything else you may desire like sending a cute note to spammers. I will soon publish the plugin API and examples of how you can write your own plugins. We call them pluglets⁴. Link Limit, as described in the previous paragraph is a pluglet too.

Unlike other comment spam prevention plugins like Spam Karma, Bad Behaviour or Akismet it doesn’t make any calls to the database, except one to update the statistics. In future releases even that will be optional.

Unlike Bad Behaviour, Spam Karma or Akismet, it doesn’t call any external servers to fetch any data or make RBL checks etc. Our principle is simple. Comment spams should consume least amount of resources; in terms of CPU, Bandwidth or memory.

Notes:
Beta testing has been successfully completed. We have successfully tested the plugin for over hundred thousand hours in real-life conditions and we are fully satisfied with its capability and absolute lack of false positives. We are gearing up for the final release in October. Please submit a comment if you are interested.

Beta testing is by invitation only. Please leave a comment below or contact us if you would like to sign up for beta. We will accept 25 more volunteers so signup now.

We will ship to our beta testers by this weekend. If you do not receive it please let me know by email or using our contact form (above).

Robotic spam is spam that is created by automated scripts. They contribute to over 99% of comment spam in any blogs based on our tests of over 10 blogs.

Human spam is when a (sub?) human being actually takes time to visit your blog and drop their spam, touting their site or services. Human spam are harder to catch and are in many cases subjective. What some considers spam, others do not. It is a matter of preference. If someone leaves a comment relevant to the context and then adds his own link (which may be a recent site), I normally approve it. Others consider even such links as spam as it is advertising their site on your blog. However I wouldn’t accept any comment containing certain keywords like v*agra, p*ker etc., others may allow them.

Pluglets are small plugins like applets are small applications, servlets are small servers or piglets are small pigs. You get the point.