How To Protect Your WordPress Blog From SPAM

Ever build a website and you got no traffic, but build a blog and suddenly you’ve got a torrent of spam comments? 

Come hell or high water your blog will be found by spammers and it will be on the most obscure places like the About page.  However, it’s not really human visitors.  Keep reading.

I’d get a lot of nonsense spam from Russia and China with nothing but ??????? question marks in all the fields or other jibber-jabber.  I did a little poking around and I’ve come to the conclusion that the likely source is from some type of bot or automated program used to post comments.  Back to that in a minute. 

Using the Askimet Plug-In

The default installation of WordPress comes with a plugin to control spam.  It’s called Automattic Kismet, Akismet for short.  You can activate the Askimet plug-in the WordPress dashboard.  I’ve used it, but it doesn’t stop spam.  It just redirects it to the Spam folder and then you have to deal with it in there.  However, you can set it to delete spam comments after ‘x’ number of days.  It’s pretty good at catching spammy messages, but it will also capture a few legitimate ones, too.   

Using a CAPTCHA Plug-In

There are many different CAPTCHA plugins available.  I use SI CAPTCHA and it’s stopped the comment bots dead in their tracks.  

Download SI CAPTCHA:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

While a CAPTCHA plugin will eliminate the bots, you still have to put up with stoooopid commenters.  Akismet will probably catch most of them, but like I said, they just get redirected to the Spam folder.

Using WP Captcha Free

I you don’t want to bother your visitors with CAPTCHA codes, there is a plugin called wp-captcha-free.  I really like that one.  I’ve begun replacing the ones that use codes with it and I have not had any problems. 

Download WP Captcha Free:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-captcha-free/ 

Related Articles:

How To Stop Fake Traceback Spam

Reliable, affordable SuperGreen Hosting offers unlimited disk space & data transfer for only pennies a month. Free instant setup. Free domain name. World class carbon-neutral data center.

WebHostingHub - Best WordPress Hosting Lightning fast WordPress optimized servers running cPanel control panel. Host unlimited blogs on one account. Fast & easy 1-click WordPress installation. Outstanding WordPress customer support. Yes, we do WordPress! A+ Better Business Bureau rating. 90-day money back guarantee. Click here to get your WebHostingHub account now.