WordPress Comment Spamming at all time High!
Its alarming and frustrating when you see the number of spam comments you receive on your blog every day and the remember that the count is going to spike up the closer your blog gets to being popular. If you see the screenshot on this page, it shows the Spam messages / comments blocked by Akismet in this month alone (20 days) and the count is as high as 20,000! If you too have a WordPress blog I am sure that you will be also facing the same issues with arresting spam.
The best practices I would recommend for any blogger to use to keep the BAD spammers out of our way are:
- Always trust and use AKISMET plugin from WordPress developers
- Report all the spam comments that you encounter
- Have strict requirements for categorizing comments, never approve if its out of topic.
- Do not approve comments with more links and names replaced with keywords.
- Disable auto approval of comments and only approve comments manually.
Controlling spam is not a single person’s game, its a team effort. Lets all join hands as bloggers to make sure you flag and report all spammers and spam bloggers. Looking forward to a brighter and cleaner Internet.
This is a very nice post. It’s an eye – opener. I really don’t understand why people send spam messages. Yes it’s frustrating and at the same time alarming if you see your statistics and found out that the spam messages you receive are spams. I just want to ask, is there any other way to protect your site from spammers? Thanks for the post you have here.
Dear Billy,
Its very true and all white hat webmasters are frustrated! Follow best practices i have shared here to stay away from spammers.
regards
Josh
My blog has been online just for a pair of months, and after I did the change to my own hosted version without Akismet I receive around 20 SPAM comments per day. I'm buying my akismet API ASAP. This is ridiculous.
Merry Christmas Joshu 🙂
Servando,
You do not need to buy the API, all you need to do is select its for your personal use if its reasonable and you will get a free key from Akismet.
regards
Josh
This was very helpful !!
Thanks for the best practices for controlling comment spam on WordPress blogs. It's annoying after spending time and effort maintaining an active blog, to have spammers attack it. I have activated Akismet, and found that it did help with the problem. And yes I always manually approve comments.
I haven't been reporting spammers but now I think I will. I also like the policy of only approving on topic comments.
Thanks for the posting, and wow what a spike in the past month for spam.
One method apart from AKISMET, that was really helpful in reducing spam is by using any CAPTCHA plugin, I am usin SI captcha and it works pretty fine. and yea welcome for the appreciation on the spam spike, I need a pat to get it down too 😉
cheers, Joshu