In the previous post here, I talked about how spam-bots were attempting to spam this blog, and what I used to stop it. All went well, until a couple of  friends reported (via Facebook and Plurk) that they got errors trying to leave a comment on that blog post. After googling a bit, I found a few articles that reported operational problems with WP-SpamFree, such as this one here. Granted, the number of operational problems compared to the benefits WP-SpamFree is small, it is still a problem, and it may already have happened here on this blog. When I read that article, I thought it sounded like what happened here.

It was because of this that I went searching for a new solution, and I think I might have found it in this plugin here – NoSpamNX.

NoSpamNX uses a different technique to catch spam-bots – the “honey pot” concept. Give the spam bots useless fields to fill in, and if these fields are filled in when the bot tries to submit the comment, the whole comment is discarded. Thus, no Javascript and no cookies are required. That means even less legitimate users are affected, and will probably even work for users on mobile devices.

I did the switch-over right in the middle of a spam-bot attack even! I activated NoSpamNX, then deactivated WP-SpamFree, to minimise the number of spam that may get through. Thankfully none got through, and the NoSpamNX counter started going up as soon as I refreshed the dashboard on WordPress.

Granted, NoSpamNX has less “options” to configure compared to WP-SpamFree, and also it does not block trackback spam, but it did the trick here.I left NoSpamNX running for a couple of days, just to be sure. Thus far I have not had any reports from real humans about any errors.

Comparing the effectiveness of WP-SpamFree and NoSpamNX in fighting spam-bots, I would say both are equally good. The track record for both here at this blog is 100% each. No spam got through. In technical terms, both performed equally impressively. 100% of automated spam are blocked. The only difference is that WP-SpamFree may have inadvertently tried to prevent a real human from commenting. Because of the technique NoSpamNX uses, users will never encounter this problem.

Again, on the user-end, no difference should be obvious. All should still seem as normal.

For now, I have decided to stick with NoSpamNX instead of WP-SpamFree.