Spam is one of those features that comes with a blog and stopping it isn’t quite as easy as it should be. Here are a few ideas to help you out.
- Install Akismet – This has to be one of the best plugins. The downside is they’d like you pay if you get a ton of spam. After all, it is the nice thing to do. For the average user though, it’s free.
- Install Spam Karma – Excellent plugin that can stop a flood of spam comments. It works great and it’s completely free.
- Install a captcha. It can be as easy as 2+2=? or it could be one of those letter puzzles. Personally I prefer the math ones as long as it’s not something like “What’s 28×5”. Keep it simple as I think 2+8 works just as good.
- Have some fields required. Make sure that you are requiring Name and Email for any comments. I don’t think it helps much, but it’s better than leaving it wide open.
- Use the Blacklist – Some words just don’t belong in blog comments. If you think of some ‘adult’ terms you’d like to keep out, just add them to the blacklist. The comments will be immediately deleted. Be careful though, you can’t recover deleted comments.
- Moderate More – Use WordPress’ moderation area to put more spam into moderation instead of just letting it go live and cleaning it up later. Things like changing the number of links in comments to 1 or 0 can help a lot. Also adding /strong works well as a lot of recent spam contains a few bolded keywords. Analyze your spam to see if you can find a trend.
- Install Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which is suppose to analyze the bots coming in and block the spam ones. I haven’t tried it, but love the idea.
- Login to Comment – Not my favorite method as I think that if you require a login, you also loose a lot of good comments because people won’t take the time.
- Login to OpenID to Comment – OpenID is one of the mass ID sites on the internet. One account with them will work across many websites. This is a better option than #8, but I’m still not a “login to comment” fan.
- Turn Off Comments – If you don’t have them, you won’t get spam. Then again, you also won’t get any good comments and that’s a big part of blogging.
In the end, zero spam comments is not likely. No one can stop a real person from putting in a link to their porn site. But you can help slow down the automated spam quite easily.
What plugins or tips do you have to share?
