The last few years has seen a phenomenal rise in blogging across the globe with hundreds of thousands of new people opening up their own blogs, mostly on the WordPress platform. A lot of young people are looking at blogs as their new medium of expression and therefore have taken to blogging in a massive way. What this has done is make blogging a new mode of communication and one of the most lucrative media within the internet domain.
With the rise in popularity of blogs, the phenomenon of spamming has also increased. If your blog is popular and receives a lot of visitors, then it becomes a prime target for spammers. Most of these blogs are free and hence charge anyone nothing for any advertising. The motive for the spammers is promotion of some or other product or website. So the spammers use these free platforms for promotion of their products. In a majority of situations, they leave a barrage of comments on your posts which become cumbersome. Even if you moderate your comments, it is nearly impossible for you to sift through the many comments to separate the spam comments and delete them. Hence it is important for you to have a mechanism to automatically eliminate them.
The best plugin for this purpose is Bad Behaviour. In many ways, it is similar to the default plugin provided by WordPress, Akismet. It is easy to use since it resembles Akismet and is generally very compatible on WordPress. In many ways, it is like a more efficient version of Akismet. It contains a series of scripts which block and filter a whole host of things, including comment spam, trackback spam, guestbook spam etc. Sometimes, the plugin even functions to save your blog from harmful malware activities that can damage your website.
This is a PHP based solution that helps the user in mitigating the effect of spam by reducing incoming link spam and spam activity. This is better than a lot of other plugins since in many cases, it engages in prevention, stopping the spammers from delivering their junk mail and even stopping them from reading your blog. This helps in reducing the load on your website, makes your site logs cleaner and generally prevents your blog from crashing due to too much junk traffic.
Instead of simply looking at the content of the potential spam, it analyses the delivery style as well as the spam software used. Hence, Bad Behavior is useful even if the spam generated is a new one that people don’t know of.
