Spamming has always been a big problem for businesses online. Spam comments affect all other online blogging platforms as well like discussion forums, and many others, not just WordPress. It’s not easy to stop this spamming completely. Spammers are still capable of submitting some spam to your WordPress, even if you try to disable the comments on your website.
The comments won’t get displayed on the website, but they will take their required space in the database. Because of this, the overall size of the database will increase and will slow down the speed of your website. In this post we are going to discuss some tips and tricks for lowering down the spam on your WordPress website. Also we have some plugins that will help you in preventing spam on your website.
Let us have a look at the Tips and Tricks
Hold On The Comments To Get Modified
Personally I like to moderate all the comments made by readers. If it has been sent by a bot, then it won’t get accepted and will be kept on hold for moderation. However, if somebody comments manually and provides you with their links you can always report them as spam or can simply blacklist them.
Just check for the box which is named as ‘Comment author must have a formerly endorsed comment’. If you have faith in the user and you discover their comments are important, you will approve it. If at some other time that same user makes a remark, it will be sanctioned automatically. It will also help you in saving your time for managing with approving or disapproving the given comments on your post.
Hold On The Comments Having Links Attached
Mostly the spam comments have links included in them. The best way to take complete advantage of this is to send all your comments including links into the moderation queue. It is very easy to do; you can perform it by changing the settings in the ‘Comment Moderation’ section.
By default, WordPress will automatically send comments for moderation if it has more than two links. But you can always cut it down to one because mostly the spam comments have only one comment.
Make Use of Comment Blacklist
This is an extremely valuable feature of WordPress that many people don’t think about, or they don’t utilize it. It permits you to effortlessly boycott the IP location of spammers who are repeatedly attacking your site. You can boycott the comment makers using their URL, name, content, or email address. This is an exceptionally valuable route for discouraging each one of those individuals that are submitting the spam physically. I prescribe this to everybody!
Secured Comments on Previous Posts and Pages
While a large portion of the spam will happen on the recently published posts, it is regular for the spammers to focus on the previous posts. The reason being those posts have officially created good traffic and also (probably) decent search engine rankings. Some famous articles or posts might be years old, so you might not perceive that they have been assaulted by spammers.
WordPress permits you to automatically disable the comments on posts and pages that are distributed with a characterized time period as days. I would propose that you need to set your post to 100 days to keep parity in keeping the comments empowered on the new posts and should stop the spam in the more seasoned posts or pages.
Make use of a Comment Tool
Disqus and Livefyre are two exceptionally prominent remarking instruments that will oblige individuals to log into a different record, for example, Disqus account, Facebook account and so on keeping in mind the end goal to submit comments on the blog entries. Utilizing such instruments can be extremely useful in lessening spam remarks in light of the fact that the spammers won’t put their time in logging to a completely new record for commenting.
There are also some useful Plugins that you can use for solving this problem of spamming on your WordPress website. However you cannot use all the plugins because they will slow down your site or your blog. Also some might give you errors while some might not work on your particular site. Some of them are tried and tested with anti-spam plugins that will only ask for a simple installation from your side and they will take care of the things. So here we are going to discuss those anti-spam plugins that will work for you.
Here are some of the anti-spam plugins you can use.
Akismet
This plugin allows you to check your comments against the Akismet web service to check whether they look like spam or not. Additionally, it will permit you to survey the spam that it gets under blog’s “comments” admin screen. Given are some of its useful features:
- Urls are indicated in the comment body to uncover hidden links.
- Moderators can see the quantity of sanction comments.
- It saves your disk space and accelerates your site.
The plugin is available for free if you want to download.
Quiz
This plugin will pose a question that comment writers have to answer effectively before the comment gets acknowledged. It will chop down the spambots and, furthermore, will be useful with troll-control. Writers can compose another test question and answer for each one post, or can have zero questions. Some of its useful features are:
- Enter various right answers, divided by commas.
- Answers get checked by some caseless comparison.
- Logged in clients don’t need to answer the questions.
This plugin is available for free to download.
Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin
This plugin includes a customer side produced checkbox to your comment structure and asks the clients to make sure that they are not a spammer. It is simpler for the clients to click a case than entering a CAPTCHA. Some of its useful features include:
- Set the maximum limit of comments a client can have with some moderation.
- It adds rapidly named fields to the comment structure.
- Stops 99% of all robotized spam bots.
This plugin is available for free to download.
Lastly, Comment spam is a forever battle that almost majority of website owners are facing and will be facing in future. But if you can configure all your discussion settings as we have mentioned above, you will definitely be able to reduce a lot of spam on your WordPress website.
Author Bio
Patricia Dolan is Senior Content Strategist at Data entry services, a leading digital marketing firm based in Sarasota, Florida. Patricia received her BS degree in mass communication from University of Virginia. She is an avid reader and basketball player.
