How to Reduce Comment Spam in WordPress

Introduction:

Based on PHP and MySQL, WordPress is a free Content Management System and a free blogging tool which runs on a web hosting service. As of August 2013 it has been estimated, that WordPress is used by around 19% of the top 8 million websites across the world. Released in the year 2003, till date it has become very famous and has been downloaded over 15 million times worldwide.

Spam Comments:

Comment Spam are those comments which gets posted automatically in a blog or forum by softwares or scripts. They consist of unimportant keywords and irrelevant hyperlinks that is not at all connected with article posted in the blog.

How to Reduce Comment Spam in WordPress:

The most annoying thing about WordPress is fighting with comment spam. If your self hosted WordPress blog is famous, then Comment spam is the most annoying thing to deal with. The moment you login to the dashboard of the WordPress, you see a lot of spam comments that needs to be deleted. Thus finding and fighting for the ways to prevent spam in WordPress becomes utmost important.

The article deals with some of the techniques to reduce the WordPress comment spam:

1.  Installing Akismet WordPress Plugin: No matter we make almost all the modifications developed in the world to our installation in the WordPress, the spammers will still find ways to automate their comments. Thus its important to have Akismet Plugin installed in the system. It is considered by far the best WordPress plugin to reduce comment spam. It checks almost each and every comment, pingbacks submitted in the blog and runs on a regular basis critical checks to determine whether a particular comment is a spam or is not. It also contains a stats page where one can see a complete detail on the amount of comments blocked, dates and accuracy etc.

2.  Comments on Older Posts should be closed: It is recommended not to overuse Akismet as later you will find Akismet blocking almost hundreds of spam comments at the end of every week. The spam comments then has to be deleted manually, which tends to be really boring and frustating. The best thing is to direct blocking comments on older posts. Spammers generally target those posts that has got a good amount of traffic and the best thing is to automatically close comments on those posts.

3.  Ban Spam IP Address: Wp-Ban is a plugin that generally used to blacklist IP address who try to post spam comments on blogs.  The plugin goes through the Ip address of the commentator and if you have specified the same IP address earlier in the plugin setting, the commentator will be shown a custom banned message. The plugin is advised to use with caution. If you ban the IP address, then there is a chance that any visitor who comes from the same host name will not be able to access the blog. Thus use this plugin only if certain IP’s will tend to appear frequently and post comments that are vulgar in the blog.

4.  Recaptcha Plugin: Recaptcha is considered by Google the best way to prevent WordPress spam comments in your blog. The concept of it is very simple.  Anyone who tries to post a comment has to see a graphic and type the words that match up the graphic. The spam bots are robots having no eyes or mind thus will not be able to read and write those graphics. Hence they will not be able to spam around. Though it is good yet it has a disadvantage. The commentators who comment frequently has to fill up the catcha again and again when they want to post a comment. This may appear annoying and discouraging to them.

5.  Using the Custom WordPress Function to Ban the Empty Referrers: This principle can be used to drastically reduce the comment spam. All you need to do is to login to the WordPress administration area of the blog and go to the “ Theme Editor “. Select the theme of the blog open the functions.php file for the editing purpose and paste the code.

<?php
function verify_comment_referer(){
if(!wp_get_referer()){
wp_die( __(‘You cannot post comment at this time, may be you need to enable referrers in your browser.’));
}
}
add_action(‘check_comment_flood’,’verify_comment_referer’);
?>

The code will check the referring source of the page. In case the comment is a spam one , the comments will never be allowed to be posted and thus the user will not receive any sort of spam.