Growing a popular blog is very much a double-edged sword. It’s great when you have lots of new readers leaving lots of new comments, but that also means that your site is more likely to attract all the comment spammers and spambots out there.
Akismet has been the go-to tool for this problem for quite some time, but it is not without its flaws. It “detects” many false positives: comments that are legitimate can oftentimes be flagged as spam and never seen by the blog owner. An alternative to Akismet is GASP and it claims to be more accurate in this regard.
Developed by Andy Bailey, the same guy who made the popular CommentLuv plugin, GASP stands for GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin. It works to combat spam from spambots by implementing a very simple feature. There is a checkbox that needs to be ticked before a comment can be posted. The text next to this reads, “Check box to confirm you are NOT a spammer.” Real comments get through and spambots do not.
Check out Basic Blog Tips for more information about GASP. The plugin can then be found as a free download through the usual WordPress.org Plugin Directory.
Bryan
September 1, 2011 10:12 pm
I have several blogs that I post to on occasion and about a year ago I noticed more and more emails requesting moderation of a comment. As I reviewed the comment in the moderation cue, more and more of them made no sense and it was evident that “the commenter” had not read my blog post.
For a while I just went in and deleted them but that got to be a hassle on 4 different blogs and the number of comments steadily increasing.
Luckily I stumbled across this particular plugin and installed in on all my blogs. I have to say that it stopped the spam comments almost 100% immediately. I still get the random “nice post”, but I am not getting the endless links and poorly worded random comments that plagued my sites for the last year.
Roy
November 23, 2011 6:38 pm
But guys, you’re not using it ;-)
I can confirm that GASP works very well, been using it for 9 months and it hasn’t let a single automated spam comment through.
But use as an addition, not alternative, to Akismet though as GASP doesn’t deal with human comment spam at all – Akismet or Antispam Bee etc are still required for that.