WordPress Tip: Quick Tip for Reducing Spam
April 18th, 2010 | Posted in blog 8 Comments »
Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam, more than I should be getting, so I contacted Akismet to see what I could do. They shared a tip with me that turned out to be quite helpful.
Here’s the key insight: spam is attracted to spam. Let’s say a spam comment sneaks by you and remains on one of your posts. That spam somehow attracts more spam on that same post. It’s like the spam algorithms look for posts that already have spam comments.
The first step in reducing spam, then, is to clean out all spam from your blog. But what if you have more than 1,000 posts and no time to do this? Don’t worry. Rather than moving post by post from the beginning, try this instead:
1. When a new spam comment appears on your blog, don’t just immediately remove it. Go to the Comments section in the WordPress admin area and click the talk bubble that appears to the right of the comment. This shows you all the comments for that post.
Talk bubble
2. Remove all the spam comments from that post.
That’s it. Now that post will be less likely to attract new spam. In the week that I’ve been trying this, I’ve noticed a decrease in the number of spam comments that sneak through.
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Tags: comments, spam, WordPress, WordPress Newsletter
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I noticed the same thing recently. I’m glad to know someone else is having the same fix.
I forgot to mention one other thing. Any time you write about spam, search engine optimization, or WordPress, spam attacks those posts like a magnet. Not sure why. I’m already getting spam on this post about spam.
Funny you should post this today as I was brought back to your blog due to an email informing me that a spam poster had responded to one of my comments!
Well that’s classic. But I promise that the number of spam comments is decreasing. Last week I was getting about 12+ a day. Now I’m down to about 2-3 a day.
I implemented an extreme, but very effective step. I removed the URL portion from the comment form. People can still leave comments, but the spammers can’t put in a link. because my site moderates any comment with a link in it, they can’t put them in that way either. I hate denying my genuine fans a link, but it has nearly obliterated spam on my site.
wow, I’m not ready to go to that extent yet. What’s annoying is that this post on reducing spam seems to be attracting more spam than other posts. Oh well. The battle continues.
I get over this prUblem to some dAgree by intentional misspelling the kAy words in the article (as you see from this reply)!
Interesting tip. Not sure I can misspell words without worse consequences, though.