How to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress
WORDPRESS
Wordpress is one of the most common Content Management System available on the Internet and it is a very strange fact that nearly 20% of the websites on the Internet today employs Wordpress for their content management. The question arises that what makes it so popular? The main reason for popularity of Wordpress is the easiness and the smooth interface that makes it easier even for a non technical person to utilize the power and benefits of Wordpress.
A non coder or a technical person knows the value of comments on their blogs and sites. Comments are a vital sign that your audience is well engaged and pretty much interested in your posts and websites. It also increases the popularity of your website and makes it lively. A website or blog without comments is like a tree without leaves.
With Wordpress, it is very much easier for readers to add comments to posts and pages that you add to your site. But sometimes these comments on Wordpress Hosted Sites and Blogs become a headache for webmasters due to their spammy nature. A friend of mine started a Wordpress hosted blog and he got over 7,000 spam comments in the first ten days of launch. He being a non technical person, approved all the comments and as a result, his site crashed after two weeks of its starting. Now that is the harm with spam comments and if you are using Wordpress, then be ready to get a stream of Spam comments on your blog.
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How to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress Blogs
But fortunately, if their is a disease, their is also a cure. If their are spam comments, then their are certain ways to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress. These tips have been specially formulated for the readers of IndiGiz and are quite exclusive. So here are the tips:
1) Switch off Comments for older posts:
Spammers often target the older posts that exists on your blog or website. Because they are the posts that are not cared about, and most site owners and webmasters tends to ignore older posts. So these posts are a mine of gold for spammers.
So all you need is to turn off the comments for your older posts.
You can simply do this by going to
Settings--> Discussions--> Automatically Close Comments on Articles Older than and select the number of days.
Its as simple as drinking water, but quite effective too.
2) Restrict comments on Pages
Every website has some pages like About Us, Privacy Policy, Contact and others apart from posts and contents on it. These pages are just for informational purpose, and not for commenting. So it is a better idea to disable comments on Pages of your website or blog, so that any spammer coming to your pages, will find several less spots for spamming and your spamming queue will be a bit shorter.
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How to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress Blogs
3) Keep Comments containing Links on Hold
Generally moderators on Wordpress have the authority to check the comments and their contents before posting them on the post and website. A non spammer comment will generally have no link and will be only related to the post on which it is posted. Or a legit comment can have a maximum of one link inside it, linking to the website or blog of commentator. It is quiet legal and general to approve such comments.
But you can easily detect a spam comment by looking at it. A spam comment is generally over 200 words and contain multiple links inside it. So it is quite easy to identify spam comments and you should keep them on hold.
4) Limit the counts of links allowed in links
Wordpress is so intelligent that it has some inbuilt features for preventing spam comment queue from getting too long. It has a feature with he help of which you can pre-define the maximum number of links that a comment can have in it.
If the number of links exceed the limit defined, than these comments are automatically discarded and are not shown in the moderation queue. Isn't it quite simple???
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How to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress Blogs
5) Use comment Blacklist Feature
Once you know that from which user or which IP Address you are receiving Spam Comments, than you can simply add those users and those IP Addresses to your Comment Blacklist so that their comments are not shown again to you in the moderation list. Isn't this technique so simple to prevent the activity of some automated scripts and bots on your blog???
6) Install Anti Spam Plugins
Wordpress is famous for its wide variety of plugins. All they say, you have a need, we have a plugin for your need. You have a need to stop spam comments, Wordpress has plugins for that too.
All you need is to install some plugin like Akismet Comment Plugin and others, which will automatically detect the spam comments and will not allow them. Although they will also show you the list of disapproved comments, but they will loosen your burden a lot. You can give a try to other plugins also. Wordpress has plenty of them.
7) Use Commenting Tools
Most of the spam comments are done using some automated scripts, or bots or using any Black Hat Tool. But these tools have a loophole that these bots and tools simply cannot login to accounts, or authenticate themselves. So all you need is to install some commenting tools like Disqus, Captcha Check, Livefyre, Google + comments or Facebook Comments on your posts. So whenever a bot or software comes to your site, then they have to login and authenticate themselves. And hence your blog is safe from Spam Comments.
You are reading:
How to Prevent Spam Comments on Wordpress Blogs
I hope these tricks will help my readers to get rid from Spam Comments on their Wordpress Hosted Sites.
If you know any other trick, then please share it in comments section below.
Till then keep liking our site and visiting for more information and awesome tricks.
