If you blog with WordPress, you’re going to get spam comments. Some will be really obvious, but many Spams will be “compliment spam” which is the generic “Great post” crap with a link to a usually idiotic product site. The typical comment spammer isn’t an English speaker, which is one reason to block Chinese and Russian search engines. In 15 years of selling products online, nobody has ever bought anything from Russia or China, ever.
The spam is of course an attempt to get you to accept it and provide a link to them. With most WordPress blogs they are set to “nofollow” anyway, so your link won’t matter to a search engine. They do this anyway, because they’re usually idiots and don’t even understand what they are doing is a waste of time.
The way to free yourself from going through the hundreds of spams each week is to install WordPress SI Captcha. I’d recommend setting it to the “easy” setting so for people, they can easily read the word needed to send a comment or register for an account. This has made a huge difference on my blogs. The comment spam went from 100 a day to zero.
Also I’d recommend obfuscating your email address at a place like this. It makes the link clickable and it will open a persons email program, but harvesters can’t see it. I’d also recommend hitting alt-printscreen to capture a post with your phone number, then paste it into an image editing program and only displaying your email address as an image. A lot of phone number harvesting programs will collect your phone number then load them into an automated dialer. It just saves you a lot of time with those robot dialers. More and more of them are ignoring the do not call list, so it’s a great way to protect yourself.
I really couldn’t believe the difference after installing this plugin. For a new blogger, comment spam can be used to build up some flattering comments if you delete the link and manually edit it so it sounds like a persons name instead of “repair manual” or the other crap they do. The downside is it won’t spur any conversations. I’d just rather do without the crap or having to deal with it. Akismet works really well, but it’s better not to get a comment in the first place unless it’s submitted by a real live person.
Get this plugin, but set it to “easy” so someone with mature vision doesn’t get frustrated trying to read the captcha code. You can always adjust it in the future, but OCR for spam comment programs isn’t there yet, so there’s really nothing to worry about. I tried a few others, but this one works the best, and is most compatible with themes.
How to stop wordpress comment spam
If you blog with WordPress, you’re going to get spam comments. Some will be really obvious, but many Spams will be “compliment spam” which is the generic “Great post” crap with a link to a usually idiotic product site. The typical comment spammer isn’t an English speaker, which is one reason to block Chinese and Russian search engines. In 15 years of selling products online, nobody has ever bought anything from Russia or China, ever.
The spam is of course an attempt to get you to accept it and provide a link to them. With most WordPress blogs they are set to “nofollow” anyway, so your link won’t matter to a search engine. They do this anyway, because they’re usually idiots and don’t even understand what they are doing is a waste of time.
The way to free yourself from going through the hundreds of spams each week is to install WordPress SI Captcha. I’d recommend setting it to the “easy” setting so for people, they can easily read the word needed to send a comment or register for an account. This has made a huge difference on my blogs. The comment spam went from 100 a day to zero.
Also I’d recommend obfuscating your email address at a place like this. It makes the link clickable and it will open a persons email program, but harvesters can’t see it. I’d also recommend hitting alt-printscreen to capture a post with your phone number, then paste it into an image editing program and only displaying your email address as an image. A lot of phone number harvesting programs will collect your phone number then load them into an automated dialer. It just saves you a lot of time with those robot dialers. More and more of them are ignoring the do not call list, so it’s a great way to protect yourself.
I really couldn’t believe the difference after installing this plugin. For a new blogger, comment spam can be used to build up some flattering comments if you delete the link and manually edit it so it sounds like a persons name instead of “repair manual” or the other crap they do. The downside is it won’t spur any conversations. I’d just rather do without the crap or having to deal with it. Akismet works really well, but it’s better not to get a comment in the first place unless it’s submitted by a real live person.
Get this plugin, but set it to “easy” so someone with mature vision doesn’t get frustrated trying to read the captcha code. You can always adjust it in the future, but OCR for spam comment programs isn’t there yet, so there’s really nothing to worry about. I tried a few others, but this one works the best, and is most compatible with themes.