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.