Fighting against spam is one of the worst job for forum or blogs owners… As everybody, I was hit by nasty bots. It was time to take concrete actions…
First, I don’t like the “quick and dirty” fix “Do not allow comments nor trackbacks”. If used correctly, they can greatly enhance the blog quality.
I installed two WordPress plugins and it seems that I’m not safe (read “until the next spam waves”)
1. To catch bot posting comments, the poster must be registered, then, it has to answer a simple math. Example: “What is the sum of 2 and 9?”. The plugin name is Did You Pass Math.
2. A few weeks ago, bots started to hit me via the trackback feature. So, I installed the Trackback Validator plugin. It simply checks if the provided URL really contains a link to my blog. If not, it is tagged automatically as spam.
Those two plugins do perfectly their job!