How to Reduce Blog Spam Comments

Posted by Madhavi on Oct 19, 2011 in Blogging, WordPress 101 | 0 comments

This article is a guest post by Christine Kane.

If you blog for long enough you’ve probably become very familiar with the spam comments that pop up. You know the ones, they usually have some ridiculous statement such as, “Dag naibbt good stuff you whippersnappers!” clearly marked by misspellings and a link to some obscure website. And sometimes the spam comments come in phases, on any given day I can log into my account and have 100 new spam comments waiting for me or zero – it all just depends on what I’ve written and where it’s pinged off to.

And no one wants to sit there and sift through comments marking the vast majority as spam just to reach the one genuine comment. So is there any way to reduce the number of spam comments you receive? Of course! It’s 2011 after all!

1. Akismet

Probably the most popular spam-blocking tool, this software is highly effective at verifying if a comment is spam or is legitimate. It goes through a very detailed process of checking everything and leaves you a status report identifying how many comments have been marked as spam, etc. Plugin The one big drawback is that it can cost money depending on the type of blog you have – but for how effective it is it’s probably worth the financial investment. [Learn More at www.akismet.com]

2. WP-Hashcash

This plug-in filters spam from genuine comments by having your visitors use obfuscated JavaScript to verify they are not a spam bot. When used in conjunction with Akismet, the two can pretty successfully block the majority of spam comments that find their way to your website. [Learn More at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/]

3. Comment Limit

Because spam comments are pretty non-discriminatory when it comes to picking posts to comment on, they can end up on posts that haven’t seen the light of day in months. One way to eliminate this is by turning on Comment Limit, which allows you to close comments on posts after a certain number of days (specified by you).

4. Comment Verification

You’ve probably stumbled across blogs that tell you that “your comment is awaiting moderation” after you try to leave one. This means that your commenters will receive an email to verify that they are the commenter or that you have to go in and manually approve it. Both are time consuming ways to verify comments, but they are effective.

5. Captcha

captcha You’ve probably seen this feature on hundreds of websites – once you leave a comment you have to type in a word or series of letters to prove that you’re not a spam bot before your comment will be approved. This is my least favorite way to combat comments because it can annoy regular commenters and deter them from commenting but it does work effectively. [Learn More at WordPress.Org]

It’s unlikely that you’ll ever remove 100% of spam comments from your blog, but you can drastically reduce them by using one or more of the above-mentioned methods. Every now and then though when I need a good laugh I’ll go into my spam section to see what they’ve come up with this time – you can’t help but giggle when someone posts something like “Thank God! Someone with brains speaks!”

Author Bio

This Guest post is by Christine Kane, a graduate of Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of subjects including internet providers in my area for different blogs. She can be reached via email at: Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com