How to shut up comment spam! maillardvillemanor January 20, 2014 Featured Blame Google if your blog gets tons and tons of spam blog comments which pushes you legit comments out of sight and slows down your whole website. The spammers are motivated by google to push up their websit higher in googles search engine and use google to find your site to post to. If you run a wordpress site like mine you will be constantly bombarded with thousands of spam comments one after the other…pushing real comments out of the window. Here I will list a number of ways you can get rid of all that spam. Akismet Akismet is a good plugin to start using.. its free (for basic use) The plugin works by using data it has gathered from analyzing millions of sites and using that data akismet prevents known spammers from posting on to your site. Pros Doesn’t annoy your readers as much as other ways! Blocks most known spammers that are one the akismet database. Cons Akismet is not effective at preventing spam that akisment doesn’t know about.. ie new spammers (Ip addresses) that have not made it onto the blacklist Captcha Using captcha is another good way to prevent spam sort of… Pros Quite effective CONS Annoying to your users. If the bot knows how to solve your captcha by using programs such as GSA captcha breaker it renders the whole process pointless. (adding a simple custom captcha question to your comment forms that is unique to your site will help prevent this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-no-bot-question/) Spam word black list Just add this list of words to the comment blacklist found under Settings >Discussion AND THAT’S IT! How it works is that wordpress will ignore any comments containing words found in the blacklist.. Pros Sends any comment with the words ugg or nike air max to your spam folder. Unobtrusive Cons Sometimes non spam comments if they do contain a word that is in the blacklist will be pushed into the spam folder. Turn off track backs and pingbacks Remember to turn off trackback and ping backs by unticking “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” in your discussion settings for peace and quite. Pros Hardly ever will you get a real track back. Cons You wont get pingbacks from real other blogs linking to yours. Doesn’t seem to work for wordpress pages. Peace at last! Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment.