How To Prevent Spam on Wordpress Blog

April 4, 2013 8:27 AM

I have a wordpress blog. Comment sections is being filled daily with spam comments. Is there any way I can block these?
posted by goalyeehah to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Install the Akismet plugin.
posted by royalsong at 8:30 AM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Are you running your own instance of Wordpress? There's a number of spamproofing plugins; I used Akismet but there may be something newer.
posted by griphus at 8:30 AM on April 4, 2013

I use both Akismet and do the following:

Under Settings --> Discussion, check:

Before a comment appears: An administrator must always approve the comment

Then you can just mass delete all the spam comments that get through Akismet.
posted by jabes at 8:37 AM on April 4, 2013

We use the "Bad Behavior" plugin on a bunch of sites. I think it works pretty well.
posted by belladonna at 8:37 AM on April 4, 2013

I use Akismet and it's really useful. You may need to do some tweaking to make sure its working correctly (and then check the spam filter for genuine comments) but it is not bad. I also used to use a very simple captcha program (not updated but you can get the general idea) to get people over the "are you human or a bot" hurdle.
posted by jessamyn at 8:39 AM on April 4, 2013

I also use askimet. It's also worth changing the settings on how long your posts are open for comments and removing comment options from pages (unless you want them), I look after a few Wordpress installs and cutting down the places for them to comment has really slowed the stream down.

You can do a bulk edit on all pages and just untick the allow comments box, if you go that route. Closing comments automatically after x number of days is in discussion settings.

I also use the moderate but once people have x number approved comments, then they go through fine setting, which helps.

(I am frequently amused by the current trend for spam comments either being really complimentary or insulting. It makes my skim through the spam filter a joy forever, especially when they're shilling for the same thing.)
posted by halcyonday at 10:45 AM on April 4, 2013

I'm not sure if you're interested in 3rd party commenting systems, but if you are, consider Disqus. There are a lot of reasons I like it (one reason is you can get emailed replies to your comments, without subscribing to emailed replies to the whole thread) - and it seems to do a good job of filtering out spam. You can also set it to filter out all links.

Another thing I like is that you can whitelist people - so I have my system set up to moderate all comments, but all my trusted, regular commenters are whitelisted, so their comments show up immediately (yay for them, and yay for less work for me).

Captcha: I personally HATE & LOATHE captcha and am way less likely to comment on a blog that uses it. If I decide to comment then I get it wrong once, there's about a 50% chance I'll decline to comment rather than try again. I know I'm not alone. Keep this in mind when deciding whether to use captcha.
posted by insectosaurus at 10:52 AM on April 4, 2013

On one of my self-hosted WP installs, I use the following:

- Akismet
- Bad Behavior
- WP Spam Free
- Conditional CAPTCHA

I very rarely have a false positive (I know of two in the span of more than two years via twitter/email contacts). My Dashboard spam stats:

Akismet has protected your site from 1,842 spam comments already.
There are 338 comments in your spam queue right now.

33,744 spam comments have been automatically discarded by Conditional CAPTCHA.

WP-SpamFree has blocked 6,013 spam comments.

That, for me, seems to be the winning combination. :) Good luck!
posted by juliebug at 3:49 PM on April 4, 2013

I use Akismet and hashcash. Hashcash works invisibly—it forces the viewer's browser to perform a complex calculation in Javascript and return the result with the comment. Most spam clients won't run Javascript at all, and if they do, this slows them down.
posted by adamrice at 8:42 AM on April 5, 2013