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How To Stop 99.79% Of Comment Spam

Interesting to see regular forum posts from bloggers who are still having problems with spam comments.

Personally, i rarely get spam comments that i have to deal with manually.

The main reason for this is that i have installed and setup an excellent plugin that stops over 99% of all spam comments.

Firstly, here’s my comment spam stats.

Comment Spam Stats

Best Anti Comment Spam Plugin

If you’re new to WordPress or haven’t installed Akismet, here’s a slideshow about how to setup this excellent anti comment spam plugin.

Otherwise, you may prefer a written tutorial on the same subject.

Still having problems with spam comments?

Native Discussion Settings

Try configuring your Discussion settings so all comments need to be approved before they’re posted.

This method works extremely well in conjunction with Akismet and should be all you need to wipe out most spam comments automatically.

Banning Specific Sources of Spam

Automated spam can be a real headache unless you know how to prevent it from happening in the first place.

If you’re find you’re getting heaps of spam bots from specific sources, learn how to easily block specific I.P address and countries.

Anti Spam Captcha

Installing and anti spam captcha is a last resort and will make it harder for genuine commentators to post quality comments.

If you need to, SI Captcha Anti Spam plugin is one of the most popular solutions.

More Anti Spam Captcha Plugins

There’s a couple of other anti spam captcha plugins which work well.

Captcha – This plugin produces a maths equation which needs to be answered before the comment is submitted.

maths question

WP Re Captcha – This plugin displays a captcha below your comment form which you can configure so its easy or hard to answer.

recaptcha

Remove Website URL From Comment Form

Add this code to the end of your child themes functions.php file and it will remove the website field from your comment form.

This code uses the WordPress comment_form_default_fields filter to modify and in this case remove the website url field from the comment form. It also uses the genesis_comment_form_args filter as well.

Remove Comment Form Allowed Tags

Removing the allowed tags from your comment form reduces spam bots which read the HTML in your source code that basically says you can add links in your comments.

Conclusion

Its rare that i get comment spam from spam bots because Akismet handles that type of automated spam very well.

The only problem i have on this blog is manual comment spam but its never caused me any real problems.

Stopping spam comments shouldn’t be a problem these days if you’ve installed Akismet and configured your discussion settings correctly.

How about you. Whats been your experience with spam comments? Ever had any problems worth discussing?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Hi Brad, it was only weeks ago a number of my websites were getting comment spam. Most of the spam comments were from Trackbacks as I didn’t allow comments on any articles. I installed NewStatPress to track visitors and you could see the same pages or posts being hit even after the few fixes.

    I removed the URL field but this didn’t stop the spam comments so I also installed GASP and added some code to the functions file to check for an empty referrer. If empty don’t allow the comment.

    Since these fixes I have had no spam comments. Just today another of my websites has a trackback containing spam so looks like I’ll have to go through all my websites.

    Colin

    • Yeah there was a big surge of spam a few weeks ago. Some even got through Akismet (which is very rare) but sounds like you’ve nailed it now Colin?

  2. I still received comment spam with Akismet. It didn’t reduce it to the extent that you claim, though it certainly reduced some.

    My best advice for getting rid of comment spam is to install a comment platform like Livefyre. I receive almost zero comment spam now, and on the rare instances that I do, Livefyre almost always filters it for me so that I don’t have to moderate comments (which is ALWAYS bad) and so that I don’t have to resort to Captcha (which is ALWAYS bad). It also has an option to provide a link to the commenter’s most recent post, like CommentLuv, but Livefyre is an entire comment platform where CommentLuv is just a plugin for that one single function.

    One other benefit for Livefyre is the “Bozo” function: if you have a troll that won’t go away easily, but can get past spam checkers because he actually is human, you can “bozo” his comment, which means you hide it from everyone besides him: he thinks it’s still visible, but since no one else can see it, no one else can “feed the troll.”

    • Hi Patrick.

      Yeah i really liked Livefyre but had tech issues with it over a year ago. I did get more comments when i used it and loved the appearance.

      I really get close to zero spam now so not sure why others that use Akismet do.

        • I always liked it but was worried about the links from comments on other sites and how Google would treat this at some stage. They don’t like non natural links. Does this worry you at all Larry that at some stage they might see this as link building using automated means?

          • You can set links to be nofollow and only give dofollow likes to those that have had at least 3 comments approved. Check out Ileane Smith’s blog. She has some good tutorials.

          • Yeah i forgot about that so i guess its worth a full review of the plugin. I’ll see if i can get one and test it out properly. Thanks Larry.

            P.S I can’t remember if i asked you if you wanted to guest post?

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