Understanding spam filtering

  • I’m struggling to understand the details of spam filtering and I’m wondering if someone can help me please.

    I have my comments set so new commenters are held in moderation. I have also set things so that some common words (you know the obvious ones) go to spam or trash.

    So if a comment comes in and ends up in moderation, spam or trash, and I trash them in my dashboard, does that mean they leave no record in the database? Do they have a comment number that therefore doesn’t appear and is never used?

    If I use a spam filter plugin, do they generally (a) block the comment from even appearing, or (b) send it to trash, or (c) send it to spam, or (d) put it in moderation? Or do they all operate differently?

    If someone could answer those two questions, or else point me to the page that answers them simply, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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  • Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic.

    If I use a spam filter plugin, do they generally (a) block the comment from even appearing, or (b) send it to trash, or (c) send it to spam, or (d) put it in moderation? Or do they all operate differently?

    A) Yes. That’s kinda the whole point of spam plugins. Comments that get the spam flag are not shown to visitors.

    B) They don’t really send it to trash as much as some of them will deleted ones past a set date. In WordPress the spam and trash queues are separate.

    That’s really a question you want to ask in a specific spam prevention plugin’s support forum. Many of them have different capabilities on how to handled the scenarios you’ve posted.

    C) Yes, spam plugins assign a comment the spam flag. They all leverage the built in spam queue.

    D) No spam plugin puts a comment in the needs approval queue if it is flagged as spam.

    Which spam plugins have you looked at?

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Hi, thanks for this info. I used to use WP-Captcha-Free, which was really good, but it is no longer supported and eventually began to prevent comments altogether. I would have loved to find where it was clashing with the latest version of WordPress and update it, but I’m not that skilful! ??

    I tried Antispam Bee but didn’t find it as effective, and currently I am using the Honeypot extension in SEO Framework, which seems better than Antispam Bee but not quite as good as WP-Captcha-Free. Both work on the idea of identifying automatically Spambot behaviour that is different to human behaviour, and WP-Captcha-Free seemed to do the best at that. But of course human trolls and spammers still get through.

    I am just trying to understand how they all work, to see if I want to try something else, and whether I could use two at once.

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