At the moment this site is in a "semi-online" test phase where I am testing how it copes with online traffic and access before getting too carried away with certain modules and plugins as I have in the past. One such focus is the commenting system which has started to attract more spammy posters as the website gains rankings with Google and link-ins from other sites due to the Ableton content I have hosted.

This website runs Joomla with the K2 document system which has an in-built commenting system with Google Captcha. Seems that it should be secure enough to stop spam but in the last 2 weeks I have had about 30 spam comments.

The issue is not with the anti-spam system or a back door from what I can see. The issue is simply that a human spammer or a very sophisticated script still is able to validate the captcha image and post their spam links. 

I have been looking for a solution to this issue and finally found a plugin for Disqus K2 Comments. I had looked into this before but the issue is that the default Disqus plugin they offer integrates with the default article system in Joomla, not the K2 system which I am using and really do not want to shift away from.  

This new comment system adds the same kind of comment section at the end of certain articles just as before but with a heap of new features:

- Comments are protected from spam using the Disqus spam filters
- Users can easily comment using their social media credentials
- Users can now reply and create discussions with other users
- Notifications can be sent to users when replying 
- I can easily manage, administer, reply and remove comments when mobile
- No email or other details need to be left and no signup to comment

So, loads of improvements and the best part should be a reduced number of spam comments.

The installation of this plugin is super simple. It just replaces the default comment system hook with the Disqus comment box so that means to add or remove a comment box for an article is a simple case of selecting the "Comment" option for the article. 

There are a couple of very small bugs with this replacement though. The comment counter does not always update and would normally display DISQUS_COMMENT which was an easy fix to just change the display in the PHP file to something nicer. 

The second issue is that when displaying multiple articles within a category each article would have a "Comments" and "Read More" link at the end. The comments link would open the article and display the comments under the old comment system but dows nothing using Disqus until you open the article manually. This was fixed by just removing this comment link when in category view using this in a custom CSS file:

.catItemCommentsLink {
display: none!important;
}

Will need to test this new comment system and see how it performs. I have read a few people having some small issues but hopefully it solves the spam issue and I can get stuck into more important things.