I’ve been running this blog for a number of years (since 2009), and one thing that really irks me is the amount of spam comments my blog gets. I use comment moderation (sorry for sometimes being way behind in moderation, BTW), so my blog isn’t full of spammy comments. Spammy contact emails can happen as well. But it can obscure real comments that I need to moderate. For example, over the last few years my blog has over 9,500 spammy comments:
I disabled Akismet and installed CleanTalk. I gave it approximately a week, to see how well it did. It’s vastly better, and blocked more than 4,600 spam attempts. Only 4 got through and that was before I enabled the SpamFirewall option.
Since enabling the SpamFireWall options, I haven’t had any slip through! Yippee! While I don’t expect any solution to work 100%, CleanTalk is a most significant upgrade and well worth the small fee. Speaking of fees, yes, it’s not a free service. Depending on the number of sites, number of years, and their add-on packages, it still is quite the value. For example, I did 3 web sites for 3 years and it was a whopping total of $38.
They do have a mobile phone app as well, but frankly, don’t bother. While I appreciate their attempt at adding a mobile dashboard, it’s pretty pathetic. And, it’s not like you need to routinely access the service. So for me, it’s just a set it and forget it service and ditch the mobile app.
If you run a WordPress site and tired of spam, give CleanTalk a try. It has a free trial period, which proved to me that it works as advertised and held up to the positive reviews.
