Ways To Reduce Spam Comments Spam On WordPress

Every one know WordPress is one of the best tools for blogging as well as for websites. If you are the webmaster of a fairly popular WordPress blog, you might have already experienced the number of spam comments you receive a day. Manually flagging and deleting these comments is not possible by any means. Most of these spam comments are posted manually to add links to the comment, but most of the cases these are automated causing huge load on your comments database. You also cannot afford it to leave the spam comments as it increases your database size.

So you need to have some method to prevent spam or reduce it. Below are some simple ways to reduce spam comments on WordPress.

Akismet is one of the most valuable plugins for WordPress. You do not need to download it as it comes pre-installed with all WordPress installation. But you do need to activate it and get an API key. You can find out more about Akismet in our Akismet 101 Guide for WordPress Beginners. Without this, you have no chance against SPAM. Akismet does a great job in catching SPAM comments. Although sometimes good comments get filtered as SPAM, but you can always recover them by going through your SPAM comments regularly.

Comments on older posts are more likely to be spam than real. You can reduce this type of comment spam by going into the Discussion settings section of your WordPress dashboard and configuring your comment settings so comments are closed on posts that are older than a certain amount of time. For example, close comments on all posts that are over 90 days old if you're seeing a lot of spam comments on posts that are older than three months.

AVH First Defence Against Spam is a feature rich anti-spam plugin that checks the IP of a commenter against the spam databases at Stop Forum Spam, Project Honey Pot, and The Spamhaus. Blocking spammers before they attempt to send a comment can reduce bandwidth and reduce the load on your CPU.

The plugin can also store IP information about hackers in your database. This can make your database grow quickly in size if you receive a lot of spam submissions; which is why the feature is disabled by default. Blacklists and whitelists are also available to help you control who can and cannot publish comments.

This is completely your choice. However, I prefer to moderate all the first comments made by a reader. If it’s a bot, the comment will not get accepted and will be held for moderation but, if someone manually comments just to get the link juice then, you can either blacklist him or mark his comment as spam.

In simple terms, the best way to do this is: put a tick on the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. When you trust a reader and find his/her comment relevant, you approve it. The next time the same reader makes a comment, it gets approved automatically. This saves you a lot of time so now, you don’t have to deal with approving/disapproving comments that frequently.

Also note that comments containing more than 1 link will be held in moderation; this is pretty good to avoid spammers who are most likely to fill up the comment with links.

Wp-Ban is a useful WordPress plugin which can be used to blacklist IP addresses who try to post spam comments in your blog. The plugin checks the IP address of the commentator and if you have already specified the same IP address in plugin settings, the commentator is shown a custom banned message.

Once you activate the plugin, keep an eye on the IP addresses of the spam comments. Next, add the IP addresses in the plugin blacklist and bingo! You will find that the number of spam comments are reducing as IP blacklist increases.

This plugin should be used with caution. If you blacklist an IP address, any visitor coming from the same host name would not be able to view your blog. Use this plugin to blacklist certain IP’s if they appear too frequently and post vulgar comments in your blog.

Now a snippet has different meanings in different context, but what I mean here is adding some text above your comments to set the tone for your community.

In this text, you can let commenters know what you’d like from them. You can tell them to add positively to the conversation, avoiding attacking each other, along with no obscenities or name-calling. This doesn’t mean they can’t criticize your work or debate with other commenters, but it should always be in the spirit of positively adding, rather than hurting each other.

If you’re using Akismet and you’ve closed comments on your older posts, and you’re still getting too many spam comments, there are a few drastic measures you can take. One of them is CAPTCHA.

You’ll recognize CAPTCHA as those often-hard-to-read-and-sometimes-crazy-making letters that you have to enter to complete a task on certain websites, usually to submit something or join. CAPTCHA is a really good way to stop spammers because they pretty much can’t get by it, but it’s also going to discourage some people from posting comments as it can get really frustrating.

You can find lots of WordPress.org CAPTCHA plugins if you’re interested. Really Simple CAPTCHA is one of the more popular ones.

Comment spam is an ongoing battle that most website owners have to face on a daily basis. Thankfully, if you configure your discussion settings correctly, few spam comments will actually be published on your live website. Whichever moderation option you choose, be sure to check your moderation queue and spam folder on a regular basis as there is nothing more discouraging to readers than having a long detailed comment deleted :)