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If you’ve ever run a blog or website, heck, if you’ve ever had an email account, you have gotten spam. I’ve been using the Internet for more than a decade, and I’m still not sure why spam exists. Somehow, these people are benefiting from aggravating the rest of us. I can’t imagine such aggravation generating sales or money, but apparently a large percentage of non-web savvy people ( I hope) click through and maybe even buy into this crap. That’s what whoever coined the term, “spam” should have called it…crap.

When I launched this site, a friend of mine said, “You’re going to want to use a CAPTCHA plug-in or the spam will kill you.” I said, “Bah, I’ll install one when it becomes a problem.” For those of you asking, “What in the world is a CAPTCHA?” You’ve seen them. A CAPTCHA is an image used on the Internet usually for site registrations, logins, and comments where you type the numbers or letters in the image into the field below it to prove you’re human. I began receiving 1 to 2 spam comments per day almost right off the bat. I can deal with 1 to 2, but it has continued to increase over the last several weeks until one day I logged in and I had 39 comments to sift through. It was time to find that plug-in.

As I’ve written before, WordPress comes packaged with Akismet. Akismet is a spam catcher plug-in that roots out the crap. Akismet is a powerful plug-in and it does its jobs by sorting your comments into the good and bad piles for you. However, Akismet isn’t enough by itself when the spam increases in volume. A CAPTCHA plug-in will catch the rest. I installed Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress. Conditional CAPTCHA was designed to work hand in hand with Akismet to deal with spam. I must say it nipped my small spam problem in the bud.  It sends any comments that do not input the CAPTCHA correctly straight to the trash.

Now you don’t have to use Conditional CAPTCHA. You can use one of the many different CAPTCHA plug-ins that have been developed for WordPress. Pretty much any one will do in combination with Akismet. This will eliminate your spam problem. Now I just need to figure out which IP address belongs to the Sexaprize bot that keeps crawling my site. No doubt that was the one leaving the rather tasteless comments on totally irrelevant posts…as I don’t have posts relevant to sex or prizes as of right now.