How To Stop Spam in WordPress

June 9, 2011 in Blogging by

One of the most annoying things in WordPress (and not only) is the continuous spam. The screenshot on the left side was taken from one of my blogs which in less than 2 years has received more than 51 thousand spam comments (thats actually 69 comments per day and thankfully that blog was just an experiment from my part). In this article I will write how you can have a nice looking spam free blog.

1.Akismet

The very first thing to do is activate AKISMET, it is really crucial and will catch most of the spam coming from various suspicious locations. You should have an activation key from WordPress.com (you get it after you signup)

2.Comments Cleaner

Most of the people comment on blogs with the sole purpose of getting a backlink. What if you remove that? Comments Cleaner does exactly what it says! You have the possibility to check one of the options below:

  • Remove Author’s URL
  • Remove HTML Tags
  • Remove BBCode tags
  • Remove plain text links

3. Remove Author URL box

Another possible solution to stop spam is by removing totally the author’s url box. Most of the spamming comments are done automatically by using various bots so it wont be able to locate the field to populate it with the spam url :)

If you want to remove it, then go at Appearance -> Editor -> Comments.php and then locate the following lines of code:

<label for=”url”>Website</label> <input type=”text” name=”url” id=”url” value=”<?php echo esc_attr($comment_author_url); ?>” size=”22″ tabindex=”3″ />

 

If you have any questions or inquiries do not hesitate to use the comments area below (don’t try to spam it, it wont pass :P)