Winning the Fight Against Comment Spam
By Mitch Keeler
With WordPress, I have developed an almost fool proof way to kill off all comment spam.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but back when I had my blog on one of those other self hosted blogging solutions - comment and trackback spam was horrible. I was getting hundreds of them in by hand, and I had to go through them all one by one and Veeeagra offer after vi@gr/\ offer to keep myself spam free.
Now with WordPress, I have a three punch combo that so far has done the trick. Now the first jab in this drag out fight would be Askimet. Love it or hate it, it does it’s job pretty darn well. It filters your comments looking for spammy traits.
The hook punch of the battle would be Comment Timeout. It turns comments off on older posts after a certain period of time. Most comment spam happens on older posts, so this eliminates even being able to deliver you spam comments. Plus, who other than spammers comment on a three year old story?
Now the knock out blow that will leave your comment spam problem in the dust is WordPress itself. You need to login to your WordPress admin interface, click on Options and then Discussion. Make sure you have the check boxes marked for :
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment
Then set a number of links you will allow in a comment before it will be held for moderation. The default here, 2 or more should be good enough.
You no longer need to fear the comment spam in your WordPress install because I can almost promise you that you will see none. Every so often, you might have to weed a false positive out of the Askimet moderated comments list but that is a better alternative than doing this all by hand for sure.
January 28th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I’d definitely like to see more on this in future issues, Mitch. As always tho I truly appreciate your efforts to help out us small webmasters
January 29th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Please forgive me if this is a silly question, but does Lunar Pages offer WordPress? If not, how do I tie Wordpress to my website?
Thanks,
Tim
January 29th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I also use WordPress and I have to say that there is an even better solution than the one you are currently using. I use Askimet as well but it is never even triggered thanks to the Math Comment Spam Protection plug-in. In order for anyone to post a comment they have to answer a very simple math problem. I believe that there is a similar plug-in available for Movable Type as well but I switched to WordPress a few years ago so I can’t remember what it was called.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
What about those dohickey’s which require you to read some letters and number that have been twisted and blurred and then enter them into the form? Aren’t those effective or have spammers gotten tools that can read and handle those automatically? Wouldn’t this obviate the need for these other measures? (I have no idea if WordPress supports this or you can use these dohickey’s with WordPress, but if not, I feel we should lobby for it.)
January 29th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
This comments timeout is quite interesting, thanks!