WordPress has a comment function. And with the comment you are not only giving a text, but an email address and a website Url. This is OK for the blogging world: I comment on your blog and by the way give you a hint where my blog is.
And since some people only want to applaud to your blog post, they only give a short comment. Plus the email and their website.
And then there are the bad guys, the ones that do “black hat search engine optimization”. They send automated comments to your blog and add a link to their website thus creating “more importance” to their website, fooling the search engines.
This is, where the trouble begins.
How do you separate the real ones from the bad ones?
Examples:
5 comments, all same text, same website but different email addresses. Spam, right?
3 comments, all same text, same website, same email. Spam? Real person?
A comment with a website, that does not exist, but a text that 100% reads like the typical spam texts (“e.g.:Found your blog, think it’s great, will come back, bookmarked it.”). Spam? A real person that just writes the same text as the spammers?
[Edit:] Currently I doUntil yesterday I did not use any software to check comments for Spam. Main reason is was, that WordPress comes with no default captcha solution and I did not want to send all visitors comments to a server that checks for spam. Instead, all comments are waiting for approval by me.[/Edit end]
For a few weeks, I just deleted all comments that looked like spam. And that meant: Deleting nearly all, which is OK, most comments are spam.
Then I thought: What the hell, just delete the link to the spammer website before approving them.
But one side effect of this is, that you help the spammers “sock puppet” fake account to get credibility: People that would search the web would see, that this account has been active, if they do not inspect the fake message content. And you get your database filled with junk.
So what to do? I installed two plugins – one did not work too well – the spammer knew how to go around it – and the other one worked. Since yesterday I have “silence” again. Phew. After one year on iWeb with zero spam and one real comment, the 2-10 Spams per day was getting too nasty. Now I am happy again.