Is the comment spam on your WordPress blog going out of control? Are you tired of dealing with the comment spams? Well, you are not alone. Spam comments are a huge problem especially if you are not prepared to deal with them.
What exactly is comment spam? Comment spam is the harsh reality and a term referencing a broad category of spammers posting abusive comments on forums, blogs and online guestbooks. In this article we will share the best WordPress comment spam plug-in and helpful tips to reduce spam comments in WordPress. These tips will save a lot of your time and will eliminate comment spam form your website. So let us begin! 1. Turn on comment moderation You have to first make sure that no comment is posted without your approval or permission. This step will ensure that comments don't bypass any filters and it also gives you the control of which comments will appear on your website. This solution is highly recommended for business websites such as law firms, accounting etc. After turning on the “comments must be manually approved” option in WordPress, you will have to manually approve all the comments that you want to be appeared on your website. 2. Activate Askimet anti-spam protection Askimet is an anti-spam plug-in that is pre-installed in WordPress. It filters all the comment of your website through their anti-spam database and eliminates the common types of spam comments. Askimet is a pre-installed and free plug-in in WordPress, but you will need to sign up for their API key. You can get it for free for a personal blog or a small website. 3. Clean talk this is one of the best premium online (cloud based) spam protection services available for WordPress. Clean talk prevents comment spam, registration/sign up form and trackback spam and uses smart algorithms to detect spam with 'genuine' looking comments uploaded on the clean talk cloud. The service is free for a 2 week trial period after which you can continue to use and scale up the services. 4. Using honeypot to catch spam bots honeypot technology is an effective method to identify the spambots. Once they are identified, their comments can be blocked. For this, first you need to install the Antispam Bee plug-in. After activation simply go settings- antispam bee page and check the option to mark as spam. The plugin will now use the honeypot technique to catch the spam bots. 5. Minimum and maximum comment length Another way to reduce the comment spam is by using yoast comment hacks plugin to set a minimum and maximum comment length. There have been cases when the spammer was leaving hundreds of comments with just a single repetitive word. This problem can be solved by simply enabling the yoast comment hacks by setting the minimum and maximum comment length. This way a user will leave a more meaningful and appropriate comment instead of just one word. 6. Turn off comments on old posts Wordpress gives you the options to turn off the comments on the old posts. This is particularly helpful for the websites publishing content that is more like news or events websites. After enabling this option, WordPress will automatically turn off comments on the posts older than the number of days you have chosen for this option. This options also allows you to bring back the comments on the individual posts that you decide. 7. Switch off comments In case you don't feel the need of having any comments on your WordPress site, you can switch off the comments also. You can always turn off the comments in case you feel the comment moderation is going out of your hands. All you have to do is go to settings > discussion and enable “allow people to post comments on new articles” option. WordPress also has the option where you can allow the registered users to post comments on your website. Final thoughts Spam comments make your site look unprofessional and this drives the real visitors away. Cleaning up all the spam is a a challenging task. You should strongly consider putting a little time into developing a strong anti-spam strategy. The tips mentioned in this blog will be very helpful for you and it will help you reduce the comment spam on your website. Do you have any questions about how to implement any of these techniques we've introduced? Feel free to ask us in the comment section below.
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