Defeating spam in WordPress
If you let visitors comment on your WordPress blog, you have spammers trying to spam you and your readers. It’s one of those facts of internet life. Here’s some basic tips for making the fight against spam more successful. Make sure you have the latest upgrade to WordPress (2.8.1 as I write this) and read on…
Disable the ability for anyone to register unless you need it. It’s under Settings>General>Membership – deselect the “Anyone can register” box.
Enable comment moderation. Find this under Settings>Discussion>Before a comment appears – select “An administrator must always approve the comment”.
On the same Discussion Settings page, scroll down to your Comment Blacklist. These are words that trigger WordPress to automatically mark a comment as spam, which means you don’t have to deal with them. When you start getting spam, read them (but don’t click on the links!) and find words that normal visitors won’t add. IP addresses can be marked as spam too, if you find multiple comments from the same IP, add them. These words can vary, but look for words that you don’t really want on your blog and add them.
Don’t bother adding words to “Comment Moderation” since you’re already moderating comments. Once a week, visit the spam comment section (via your Dashboard) and scroll through to make sure no real comments got through.
If you don’t want to have to physically moderate your comments, try a plugin!
Anti-Spam Plugins:
Aksimet - Already installed on most self-hosted WordPress installations, but you need a code called a WordPress.com API to use it. To get the API, sign up at www.wordpress.com, but there’s no need to make a blog unless you want to (you have the option to select “just a username please”). Once you’re signed up, visit your Dashboard, view your profile and at the top will be the WordPress.com API code. Go back to your blog, activate Aksimet and add the code where instructed.
