How to stop Spam in your WordPress Blog

If you are a new blogger using WordPress then get ready to deal with comment spam. Pretty irritating but it’s a fact of life if you have a blog. The good news is, there are a wide range of  plugins for WordPress you can use to protect your blog.

Spammers use different techniques for spamming and change their way of attack every now and then so you need to be well prepared.

In this post I will discuss couple of ways to block comment spam.

Akismet: Comment Spam blocker

Akismet is a very useful WordPress plugin that blocks comment spam. Current versions of WordPress come with Akismet by default. The developer of WordPress Matt Mullenweg had developed the plugin. Akismet uses a unique algorithm combined with a community-created database to distinguish the legitimate comments from comment spam.

Akismet uses its database to catch spam comments and display them for you to take action. You can either approve it or delete it permanently. Only approve if you believe the comment is legitimate.

 

WordPress default comment spam tools

Only registered users can leave comments :

It might not be a good idea for most  bloggers but it does stop spam. Make the users to register first to log in to leave a comment and the spammers won’t be able to comment but this will stop the one time visitors from commenting on your site. Statistics shows that only one present of the visitors usually leave a comment.

 

Number of Links in the Comments:

When visitors leave a comment they are asked to supply a name, email and website link (optional). Most of the spam comments have multiple links inside. You can prevent spam by setting up a maximum number of allowed links in a comment. Legitimate comments usually have one link, anything more than 1 link is usually a spam.

 

Specify spam keywords:

You can specify keywords which are marked as spam. Once you specify the keyword all the comments containing any of those keywords will be marked as spam and move to the moderation queue for your decision.

Comment Blacklist:

Comment Blacklist box is right under the Comment moderation in Settings–>Discussion. Differences between the Comment moderation and Comment blacklist are if any word in a comment matches the keywords you specified here the comment will not appear on your blog but it will be saved in your data base marked as spam and using this database Akismet learns which comments are spasm or not.

Choose your keywords wisely. If you specify the word ass it will also block assignment, assessment, assure any word that contains ass.

TagsWordPress

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6 Responsesto “How to stop Spam in your WordPress Blog”

1. Leon Murray says:

   May 25, 2010 at 1:40 pm

   What is the best freeware spamblocker on the internet ?”,;
2. admin says:

   June 14, 2010 at 1:23 am

   I am not sure about the best spam bloker on the internet but if you have a WordPress Blog akismet is a very good plugin to catch all the spam mails
3. Taylor Reid says:

   August 2, 2010 at 3:54 am

   spam blockers are really needed these days because you will always get spam from e-mails and on your facebook account too.~”*
4. Bar Fridge  says:

   October 14, 2010 at 6:34 am

   spam blockers like malwarebytes and akismet are great, i can’t live without them*:~
5. Ear Infection Treatment : says:

   October 25, 2010 at 7:06 pm

   spam blockers are always needed these days because of the growing number of spammers online,,’
6. False Nails says:

   December 23, 2010 at 6:42 am

   spam blockers are always necessary because there are so many spam these days ‘~-