There are many great comment plugins for WordPress. This page doesn’t attempt to cover them all. Below are only the few most essential comment plugins for WordPress.
Akismet
Akismet is a spam filter plugin. It comes pre-loaded in every WordPress install. After you activate it, you’ll have to get an API key to start using it. As you sign-up for your API key, they’ll nag you for money. You can select “a single site” and “for my personal blog” to avoid having to pay.
Akismet does really eliminate all spam — but it’s a bit overcautious. It may mistakenly mark-as-spam an innocent person’s comment. You can of course visit your spam folder regularly to check for any false positives, but if your site is swarmed by spam bots — like WinkPress.com — then it’ll be hard for you to distinguish the real comment from the garbage in the spam queue…Unless you use Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress!
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
With this plugin, you can say good bye to comment spam-bots totally and forever. And, no, you don’t have to bother your visitors with annoying CAPTCHAs. This plugin will only require CAPTCHA from commenters who have been caught by Akismet.
Here’s how it works:
When a visitor leaves a comment and gets flagged by Akismet as spam, she’ll be redirected to a page that looks like the screenshot below where they have to enter CAPTCHA.
You can also use the famous reCAPTCHA box instead of the one in the screenshot. I prefer the one in the screenshot, though.
If the visitor fails to enter the CAPTCHA correctly (and all comment spam-bots will fail), you have a choice to either have the comment deleted forever or moved to WordPress trash. If the visitor enters the CAPTCHA correctly, you can have the comment moved to the moderation queue or the spam queue. I recommend the moderation queue, but choose what works for you.
For more essential plugins and tips for WordPress, checkout these links:
