Cookies for Comments

I don’t usually post articles about other people’s plugins, but every now and then, one impresses me enough to pass along to others. This plugin, Cookies for Comments, has nearly eradicated any spam problems I’ve had in the past.

I get a lot of spam here on this blog. Heaps of it.

In 2012, Akismet (everyone knows about that plugin, right?) caught 3,108,768 spam comments on my site. Those were just the ones I allowed to get to Akismet after passing through my own filters. But, too much spam was getting through.

Spam getting through wasn’t the only problem. Deleting a lot spam also meant keeping the *_comments and *_commentmeta database tables optimized. Not doing so was slowing the site down considerably. Of course, I could have addressed that, but I’d rather kill two birds with one stone if possible.

A few weeks ago, I got lucky. Jeff Chandler was dealing with his own spam issues.

[embed]https://twitter.com/jeffr0/status/370012974850646016[/embed]

Otto replied and passed along what would be one of the most important plugins that I’d ever find out about: Cookies for Comments by Donncha Ó Caoimh.

You want to know the numbers? Based on past stats, Cookies for Comments has blocked around 180,000 spam comments from even making it to the Akismet filters in the last three weeks. I’ve only had 656 that have made it through, which is a huge improvement for this little blog. This is even without the .htaccess rules (see plugin readme) that I’ve been too lazy to add.

I just thought I’d share this with you. I’ve been using WordPress for many years now. This plugin easily ranks in my top 5. Install it. Activate it. Forget about spam.