When I first started blogging in 2004, I was using Akismet, it did a great job of rounding up the obvious spammers, and tossing them into a the marvelous anti-spam pit; never to resurface again.
A few years ago, I changed to Defensio. I liked it a lot… On average, Celebrate Life receives about 400 or more spam comments daily. Of course, none of them ever make it live, since the anti-spam plug-ins do a great job of trapping them.
I didn’t have a problem with Defensio, until the last WordPress update, which went live a few weeks ago. After that, Defensio would occasionally mark legitimate comments as spam. I could have lived with that, but when I’d approve the comment, it would disappear. The comment was gone, poof, deleted….
I’ll give you an example, although, Nicole of D’Nali, had already commented a few times, after the WordPress update it saw any of her comments as spam. To make it worse, when I approved her comment, stating it wasn’t spam, Defensio thought it’d knew better and would just toss her back into the spam pile, but with a new title; very spammy. If I tried to approve it again, poof comment was gone for good.
For the most part, Defensio still did its job, and only acted temperamental with some commentators. The instant it started behaving badly, I’d simply disable Defensio, approve the comment, and then go back and enable Defensio. Yeah, that wasn’t annoying… <sarcasm>
The next reader to receive this treatment was Teeni from Aunty’s Tea Room. I guess Defensio needed someone new to torment, since Nicole’s has been silent because of computer issues.
Between you and me… I think Defensio was trying to punish Teeni for shutting down her old website. 😉
Yesterday, I pulled the plug on Defensio, and this is why…
Every single comment by Teeni would end up in the spam folder. I went through the extra steps of approving her comment, and then went on a search for a new anti-spam plugin. About an hour later, I decided to check my comments…
Guess what?
Defensio decided it wasn’t happy with my decision…
And I found Teeni’s approved comment, tossed back into the spam corner, but this time it has been upgraded to “very spammy”, and she brought friends! Hooray for Teeni! 😉 Approved comments, you know the ones that had already gone live on my site without landing in the spam box, were now hanging out with her in her “very spammy” corner. Guess what? Some of my comments were there too!
Defensio was disabled after that. I really loved their anti-spam WordPress Plugin, and only started having issues after the last WordPress update. I will be following up with Defensio to see what the issue could be. In the meantime, I’m using Akismet.
There are other anti-spam plugins available, like the CAPTCHA plug-ins, which I absolutely loathe. Some of those words are hard to read, why torment your readers with them! Also there’s GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin, but that requires Javascript to be enabled. The majority of people will have this enabled; but there are some who don’t. Addons such as NoScript ( a plugin that I use) turns off all scripts. You can manually enable scripts.
Also, a few of my blog visitors are blind. I want their experience to be enjoyable, and I don’t want them jumping through a lot of extra hoops. The American Federation for the Blind, is an amazing organization, over the years they’ve opened my eyes to many things that seeing people take for granted. They’ve written a few articles about making sites easily accessible for those who are visually impaired. I’ve included them below.
