When someone first starts out using WordPress, and then their blog starts getting some traffic, one thing they may notice is the amount of comment spam that they receive. This is a problem that can cause panic among first-time bloggers. In a matter of days a blog can be spammed hundreds or even thousands of times.
The good news is that there are many plugins available for WordPress that can help decrease, or better yet, eliminate spam. While you don’t need to use all of them, there are two that I like to use to help control spam on Technically Easy.
Controlling Spam With Plugins
I haven’t explored many of the comment spam preventing plugins that are available, but I have been using two of them for almost a year. I rarely, if at all, get any comment spam within my blog. This is a testament to the job these two plugins do.
One plugin works by analyzing how the spammer is accessing my blog, and if it doesn’t pass all the checks, then they are displayed with a message and can’t access Technically Easy. This plugin works with both human and bot spammers.
The second plugin analyzes the content of each comment to ensure it meets specific standards. Comments that include too many links are flagged as spam. The combination of these two plugins has reduced my spam to almost nil.
Let’s take a look at each of the two plugins that I have been using to prevent spam.
Preventing Access with Bad Behavior
I can’t remember how I came across Bad Behavior, but I’m glad I did. This is the first line of defense to blocking comment spam for Technically Easy.
Why do I say this is the first line of defense? Simple, it can prevent spammers from ever reading your blog. It goes beyond a traditional anti-spam plugin in that it analyzes the delivery method and the software used by the spammer. If something doesn’t look right, Bad Behavior will prevent the spammer from even reading your blog. This will save your blog from spam as well as your bandwidth since very little from your site would have been downloaded.
The spammer, in turn, will receive a forbidden message instead of your site. I have seen this recently when I had an issue with Bad Behavior, but overall, I haven’t had many problems using this plugin. I highly recommend you give Bad Behavior a try.
Removing Spam With Akismet
Bad Behavior won’t catch all the spam, especially if it doesn’t detect anything wrong with the spam’s delivery method. This is where Akismet comes into play.
Akismet is probably the most popular anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It is installed, but not active, when you install WordPress. To activate it, simply create a WordPress.com account and retrieve your API key. You then use this key to activate and use Akismet.
Akismet analyzes the content of a comment to determine if it is spam or legit. If it determines the comment is spam, it will flag the comment as spam. You can review all the spam comments to properly determine if the comment was legit within the Comments options within WordPress.
I haven’t had any real issues with Akismet, and it has only flagged a few legit comments as spam. Akismet has found over 3,000 spam comments on Technically Easy over the past year. This is after Bad Behavior has stopped thousands more from even posting a comment. Bad Behavior keeps a log of all the entries that are rejected in case you would like to find out where most of the spam-attempts are coming from.
With both Bad Behavior and Akismet enabled on my blog, I get very little comment spam appearing within the actual comments on Technically Easy. If you would like to prevent spam on your WordPress blog, I suggest you look at installing and activating both the Bad Behavior and Akismet plugins.