Rescue Non-Spam Comments With Conditional CAPTCHA 
Posted by Udegbunam Chukwudi on August - 23 - 2010
Whether we all agree or not, Akismet till dates remains the best anti-spam plug-in for WordPress blogs. If you’re in doubt all you have to do is deactivate Akismet and try any other anti-spam plug-in on it’s own and you’d note a surge in spam like never before.
Most Captcha plug-ins fail when used in combination with WordPress cache plug-ins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache and they can’t be trusted to work on their own either.
One of Akismet’s UGLIEST features is its white/blank page of horror which it throws up whenever it feels a comment is spammy is nature. This white/blank page of horror can be quite frustrating for commenters who have left lengthy comments as those comments are in most cases lost once the blank page surfaces.
Depending on how the blog author has configured Akismet, comments that trigger the blank page are either deleted entirely from the blog’s system or are stored in the spam folder for moderation. If the blog author is a busy person or just has an aversion for checking his spam folder, you can kiss any of your legit comments which lands in the spam folder, goodbye.
I implore all wordpress blog owners to PLEASE READ: Red Alert! Akismet Might Be Deleting Your Comments ASAP!
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress comes to the rescue of legit comments taking advantage of Akismet’s blank page of horror and making it useful to both the blogger and his commenters 
.
Here’s how it works and how it can help you save those legit comments and reduce those spammy comments to the barest minimum .
By default, whenever Akismet detects a comment as being spammy in nature, the commenter will be redirected to the blank page http://www.sitename.com/wp-comments-post.php. As soon as Conditional CAPTCHA detects this, it will automatically append a captcha to that page as shown below:
OR
If the commenter is able to answer the captcha quiz, his comment will automatically be approved or left in the spam folder for moderation.
If the commenter fails to answer the captcha quiz, his comment will automatically be trashed or deleted entirely from the system.
THE PROS OF CONDITIONAL CAPTCHA FOR WORDPRESS PLUG-IN
- No bot generated spam will EVER make it into your spam folder.
- No legit comment is EVER lost!
- No interference from cache plug-ins as they have no business with the blank/white page of horror.
- 90% of comments left in your spam queue are LEGIT!
THE CONS OF CONDITIONAL CAPTCHA FOR WORDPRESS PLUG-IN
- For now the plug-in currently supports Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam ONLY and can’t work without either of these plug-ins
- The plug-in lacks an option to mark the comment as pending which is needed in blogs where comment moderation is activated. With this plug-in, you either approve the comment and it goes live @ once or you leave it in the spam folder till when you’re ready to fish it out.
- Since legit comments are still left in the spam folder, Akismet maintains its records of your url being supposedly spammy and thus you remain in its’ blacklist.
HOW TO SETUP CONDITIONAL CAPTCHA FOR WORDPRESS PLUG-IN
Below is a capture of my current settings for the plug-in. The default text-based CAPTCHA works better than using reCAPTCHA.
Feel free to modify your own settings to suit your taste.
A big thank you to Onibalusi for his guest post @ ShoutMeLoud.com without which I’d probably never have discovered this plug-in: Conditional Captcha: Essential Plugin Along with Akismet to Combat Real Spam.
Also with the installation of Conditional CAPTCHA, WP Spam Free had to go as it wasn’t compatible with the plug-in and I didn’t want to have more than two anti-spam plug-ins.
Contact Form 7 which I kinda loathed in the past ’cause it supposedly slowed down the load time of my blog, is now BACK and I’d like to thank Paul of TechnicallyEasy.net for his fantastic post How To Load the Contact Form 7 Script for a Contact Page Only.
Now I don’t have to worry about the speed of my blog while using Contact Form 7 .
Feel free to leave a comment about your favorite anti-spam plug-ins and your experience with Conditional CAPTCHA.
Related Articles You May Like To Read
- How To Drastically Reduce Spam Comments
- Red Alert! Akismet Might Be Deleting Your Comments
- Top 7 Ways Of Getting Your Comments Approved Online
- Growmap Antispam Bot Plugin Complete Pictorial Setup Guide
- Remove Trackbacks & Pingbacks From Recent Comments
eya, nothing like that for we blogger peeps. But blogger recently introduced thier own antispam engine. so far, it hasnt caught any spam yet oh, but at least i am happy i can mark some people as spam. Its so annoying, there is a particular blogger who spams my blog, and leaves her link as a long dotted line, i never suspected till one day i clicked it and noticed it led me to one rubbish website.
anyway keep up the good work.
I noticed that last week when I decided to check my blogger account. Only time will tell if their system ofd spam detection would beat Akismet’s. I do still get some persistent human spammers but I’ve started using WP -Ban to ban them from my site.
Have a great week @ the hospital
well by using this technique it will be easier to sort out spammers from the quality bloggers for sure…. & also the bloggers wnt suffer any more.
Aha! So when I have received the odd blank page it means I’m being listed a possible spam? I was not aware of this.
This plugin soudns good but will it slow down my blog? I’m being very conscious about this lately since I cut down on how many I have installed.
So far so good I haven’t any reduction in speed on my blog
I mostly see that blank page (www.example.com/wp-comment.php or something like that), so that’s what it means. Though I think it’s not detecting through the email keyed in, I think it has something to do with the “name” or the “site” used, since when this happens to me, I just change the name or the URL I previously typed, then it will eventually pass through their standards.
By the way, I contacted Akismet few days ago, thanks for the heads up man.
Regards,
Jason
You’re right man. It has to do with the URL and Name used @ the time of commenting. I’ve done the same as you and my comment was accepted afterwards.
Please keep me posted if Akismet replies
I’ve seen that happen before as well. Akismet uses collective database to harvest ALL information in each box category. It then cross references that information with all the other comments in the database to find similarities, duplicates, prior reports on a particular url or email, etc.. If the database shows the url was flagged as spam from another akismet user, it will automatically go into the flagged as spam box for future posts.
In a way akismet is a good plugin, but in other ways it also seems a bit flawed and flags goods comments along with bad.
Thanks for the detailed insight with regards to how Akismet works
. No anti-spam plugin is flawless and that’s why I ain’t too hard on Matt’s Akismet. Besides it’s free 
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I Installed this plugin on my blog and it’s working like a charm. Good thing is now I don’t hve to check my spam comments for real comments and number of spam in my spam quque is less by 95%. Must have plugin wiith Akismet to fight spam.
It works pretty well but please don’t make it a habit of not checking your spam folder for legit comments
I quite agree with you Akisemt is the best anti-spam for WordPress blogs. I am currently using only Akisemt, but I am going to combine Conditional CAPTCHA with it now.
That surely frustrates you…the other day I had written a very good comment on any topic which I felt would have helped the users but well, I was shown a white page of horror…tried to contact the blog owner and his contact page was broken too. It feels bad. No doubt akismet is the best in catching spam but sometimes they don’t seem to care about the readers. They need to tweak up their algorithm a bit.
I’ve dumped Akismet and Conditional Captcha for a day now and so far so good, no spam comment yet. I’m using Growmaps Antispam Plugin now and it seems to work beautifully well
I think the conditional Captcha is the best solution for comments mistakenly identified by Akismet as spam.
Conditional Captcha is no more man. It’s got flaws. Growmap’s Anti-spam bot plugin is now the leader when it comes to wordpress spam control