What do you use to manage spam?

[Dani]

For those of you with blogs, forums, etc: What do you use to manage spam and are you happy with your existing solution? I know Akismet is really popular among Wordpress users. We have our own custom anti-spam bot that we use here and I'm trying to gauge whether it word be worth releasing it as an API.

[Ulfson]

Way back, when I was a moderator at CodeRanch, we added a list of "forbidden" words -regexps, actually- to the admin tool set. If a post contained those, it would prevent it from being saved, just saying "that looks like spam". The list was maintained manually, and allowed us to react quickly to new spam fads. I recall that some drugs or medicines came up regularly for a while, or sometimes it was someone being over-enthusiastic doing SEO for some business.

The feature eventually found its way into the open source version of JForum.

[Reverend Jim]

We got hit with a massive support scam a few years back and the posters would continuously modify to avoid the filters, like giving phone numbers as 0-0-0,0-0-0,0-0-0-0 or other variants.

[Dani]

When that happened, that was towards the beginning of when I first created our spam filter. That was quite a long time ago, now! Our spam filter ultimately evolved to just going off of a list of heuristics that tend to be common across all spam, regardless of language, so that it requires very little updating or regular maintenance. However, I do tend to spend a few hours tweaking it every 6-12 months to make sure it's as effective as it can be.

I have a little script that lets it run across all previous posts in the forum and tells me the percentage of posts that the spam filter did not catch that were subsequently deleted by moderators. I'm always trying to get that number down, while simultaneously not catching false positives.

[hamza_72]

We manage several niche blogs, including one focused on SEO strategy — for example, this guide on ranking for high keyword difficulty queries — and spam has always been a serious concern, especially on high-traffic, content-rich pages that attract attention from both readers and bots.

Initially, we used Akismet, which was helpful but often flagged legitimate comments or missed some clever spam. Eventually, we moved to a custom anti-spam solution that combines behavior analysis with keyword flagging. It’s worked surprisingly well — especially when paired with smart moderation triggers based on SEO-related terms we monitor. visit <promotional link removed>

If you’re considering releasing your anti-spam bot as an API, I’d say yes — there’s definitely a market for it, especially among site owners who don’t use WordPress or who need something more customizable. Just make sure it plays well with SEO tools and doesn't block valuable user-generated content, which is crucial for authority building.