If you operate a blog with comment facility, or have an online enquiry form on your website, there are spammers who will try to get their spam to you.

We have an anti-spam plugin that adds a simple maths question to comment forms and online enquiry forms. A lot of spambots find this a barrier, whereas a simple maths questions is easy for human visitors.

We’ve just updated the wording of the question to make it as easy to use as possible. Well, hope so anyway. And we’ve also added a small pop up link to explain why we have the question there.

So why do spammers try and leave comments on your blog posts?

Some spammers like getting comments published on blog posts in the hope it gets them a link. Even though we nofollow all comment links, it doesn’t stop spammers wanting to try.

And enquiry forms? Well, some spammers like using your online enquiry forms to send you junk mail.

There are a few lines of defence to try and reduce the number of spam comments/enquiries that get through.

Firstly we run the Bad Behavior plugin – this plugin recognises various patterns and signals that are present when spambots are trying to do their stuff.

Secondly we have our maths question. Personally I think the maths question is friendlier than the Captcha images that many websites use. Maybe a good captcha would stop even more spam, but I find that the combination of Bad Behavior and the maths question cuts spam right down.

Finding the ultimate anti-spam barrier