Three sure tips to stop WordPress spam today
If you’ve been running a WordPress powered blog or website for any length of time you’re almost certain to have been frustrated by a deluge of comments and pings promoting products, other sites or just filling your pages with gibberish. Here are three tips that will reduce, or even completely eliminately this time wasting problem.
- Disable comments completely
- Allow only registered users to comment
- Install a spam fighting plugin – Spam Karma 2
Disabling comments completely
If you don’t want people to be able to comment at all this is a quick, easy and straight forward method to stop the spam. In the administrative interface for your WordPress installation, select Options -> Discussion. Uncheck “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs” and “Allow people to post comments on the article” and click “Update Options”.
After you’ve done this, you could go a little further by removing references to comments, and the comment form template from your theme. This will avoid some themes needlessly announcing that comments have been disabled.
Allowing only registered users to comment
Allowing anyone in the world unrestricted access to comment is a fast route to spam. If do allow online discussion, ask your users to register first. Once logged into the administration pages, go to Options -> General. Tick the boxes for ‘Anyone can register’ and ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’. You may also wish to investigate the ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’ or ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’ options under Options -> Discussion.
Installing Spam Karma 2
Spam Karma (SK2) is a WordPress plugin that monitors comments and scrutinizes them before allowing them to be published. Every comment is scored against a number of tests such as where the comment was posted from, is the poster known to be good, does the content look like spam? Posts with a high enough score will be published, posts with low scores will be held for approval and posts with very low scores will be swept away. Each day an e-mail is sent to you with a summary of what actions SK2 has taken.
Download SK2 from it’s website and upload it to your plugins folder in your WordPress installation. Enable it in the ‘Plugins’ administration page. SK2 can now be configured from the “Manage -> Spam Karma 2″ page. Although the default settings should suit most people, you can tweak the tests the plugin performs. Further pages allow you to release comments from moderation, or remove spam comments that slipped through.
Further information can be found in the SK2 FAQ.
Read more about how to use WordPress for web publishing.
Great tips
However, I don’t really recommend to disable comment completely. For me, Akimset has done a great job in keeping spam from my blog. However, some spam did get through but I immediately deleted the comments and banned the IP using .htaccess.
I also installed the Bad Behavior plugin which has decreased the number of spam comments getting into my site dramatically.
I used Akismet and Karma! Like them both! Thanx for the site!
Very useful tips… glad I ran across this!
I only use Akismet on my blog, and so far it has caught all the spam. I’ve enable dofollow and commentluv on my blog to encourage visitor to leave comment. I find it interesting to get feedback from my post.
I only use Akismet on my blog, and so far it has caught all the spam. I’ve enable dofollow and commentluv on my blog to encourage visitor to leave comment. I find it interesting to get feedback from my post.banned the IP using .htaccess.
I also installed the Bad Behavior plugin which has decreased the number of spam comments getting into my site dramatically.
hehha admin
if we disabling comment form it will affect to blog visitor