Every blogger (in one form or another) has had to deal with his (or her) share of spam.

One of the greatest enablers of community is having comments enabled and allowing the reader to give feedback and add to the conversation.

However, since spam is a constant problem with comments, bloggers take measures to limit the amount of spam being received on blogs. Some bloggers use CAPTCHAs, and some use plugins such as Akismet or Bad Behavior.

The ongoing struggle with spam is why I stated that spam is a reader’s problem too. Their comment may be accidentally marked as spam, or the comment may be lost due to some ill-advised spam-blocking attempt.

So when I saw yet another anti-spam plugin for WordPress, I was extremely skeptical. Especially since this plugin works right out of the box with absolutely no configuration.

To illustrate the ease of installation, here are the install directions for WP-SpamFree:

Installation Instructions

1. After downloading, unzip file and upload the enclosed ‘wp-spamfree’ directory to your WordPress plugins directory: ‘/wp-content/plugins/’.
2. As always, activate the plugin on your WordPress plugins page.

You’re done! Sit back and see what it feels like to blog without comment spam!

And how have we managed here at the Reader Appreciation Project? The only spam we have received has been that annoying Trackback spam (only a few spam messages a day compared to hundreds). And readers don’t have to fill out a CAPTCHA and I don’t have to worry about them being blocked as with some other WordPress anti-spam tools.

I highly recommend downloading and installing WP-SpamFree. It’s a great and unobtrusive plugin to weed out almost all of your spam without imposing spam’s evil effects on your readers.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing or Stumbling this post. If not, please let us know how we can better serve you.