Expression Engine Captcha vs Akismet

Spam sucks. It’s like the cancer of the Internet. Blogs are a major target, as the comments are a perfect way to propagate links, keywords and such. Fortunately, we have some ways to fight it. One of them is Captcha, funny looking images with text, that sometimes are so hard to read, they actually block 100% of interaction. The other is automatic spam detection based on services like Akismet. Both are available for Expression Engine (EE), but the latter seems better.

Turning on Captcha in EE is very simple — the system already comes with a Captcha generation and verification engine, so it’s just the matter of switching one setting in the Comment Posting Preferences of Weblog Management. On a side note, it’s a good idea to require a valid email address to comment, and if you have time to waste — to manually moderate comments.

The drawback of this method is that users have to type in the Captcha phrase before submitting their comments. It’s not a very user-friendly approach, as the obfuscated images require more attention to read than usual text (although EE Captcha is quite easy on obfuscation, however this makes it weak).

Besides, if the user fails, there’s a high chance he won’t comment at all. Finally, all the server side work that has to be done is quite disturbing. It doesn’t matter for small blogs, but once you hit hundreds of comments per post, it may become a problem. Also, good Captcha engines are rare — see the comparison. Why not to outsource spam filtering?

Here’s where Akismet comes to play. It works automatically, sending all comments (and trackbacks!) to Akismet’s servers for verification. And if it decides that a particular entry is a spam, it just puts it away in EE for you to check wether it’s not a false positive.

How to setup Akismet system on EE? Well, the irony is, you need to create a Wordpress blog for that. This step is essential, as Wordpress users get a free Akismet API key for personal use — without it, filtering won’t work. So after you sign up and wait about 15 minutes for the confirmation mail with the key, you can download the Akismet for ExpressionEngine Combo.

Extract the contents and upload accordingly to your EE system folders, then just go to Extensions Manager and configure the Akismet Check with your API key. Finally, go to Modules and install the Akismet filter. Here you will get all the comments marked as spam. Remember to disable using Captchas, unless you’re really into it and want to use double protection.