Wordpress Automated Comment Spam

I’m not sure how my readers feel about spam, but I know I hate it. I woke up this morning, checked my admin panel here in WordPress. Low and behold 196 spam comments. All of these comment’s were promoting other sites, and contained absolutely no meaningful reply or advice.

I could tell these were spam because I wrote a few of the URL’s down and went to the library (in case they were infected sites) and looked up a few. Mostly adult content and various other things but that’s not the point. I use askimet and it works wonders let me tell you. But spammers are changing there methods now, if a site doesn’t use captcha, automated bot’s are able to post comments to your site. If it happens to be a site or using an email that your spam guard doesn’t recognize it won’t catch it and you’ll have to manually delete it. I found a number of things help to cut back on the number of spam comments I see coming through here.

1. Use Askimet
2. Use Captcha
3. I don’t like to do it and I haven’t quite made up my mind if I will, but requiring users to sign up to your site to leave a comment may reduce spam by 99%
4. Lower your URL threshold to 1 that way if there is more than just the user’s home page in the url field and in the body of the comment, it will get marked as spam.Some people set this to 2 like I do, in case one of your user’s wants to leave a meaningful link.
5. Lastly, add in some filter words. I have a list of like 60 or 70 words that triggers WordPress to automatically mark a comment as spam. This is a techie site, I should have nothing on here talking about Adlt things or Pharmaceuticals, or animals.

Related posts:

1. WP-SpamFree Review
2. Stop Self Pings in Wordpress Blog
3. Get a Sitemap on your WordPress Blog