Are you receiving a lot of spam on your WordPress Blog? To get rid of such spamming activities, we have several ways to combat comment spam in WordPress. In this article, we will share some of the valuable points that can help us to reduce WordPress spam, let’s get started.
Activate Akismet To Reduce WordPress Spam
Akismet is a valuable plugin to reduce WordPress spam. You do not need to worry much about installing the same since it has come up with pre-installed with all WordPress Installation. But one needs to activate it and get an API key. Akismet is the best choice to deal with spamming activities as it does a great job of catching spam comments. Although even the comments of our interest may get filtered as spam, one can easily recover them by going through the SPAM section regularly.
Unfollow Comment Links
Usually, new bloggers add plugins for removing a no-follow attribute from the comment author link. They think by the help of such links will be able to encourage more users to leave comments. In such a case, even non-spam comments are normally submitted by users who are not interested in discussion but the link back. Remember, it is more important to have a good quality instead of quantity, so if you are not using any such plugin then that’s great and you can be able to move on the next step.
Reduce Comment Spam Using Cookies
To come up with this method, one needs to install and activate the cookies for the comments plugin. Most of the spambots are automated scripts, for spam the more sites in less duration of time they don’t download any images or the style-sheets. Such a plugin sends a user an image or stylesheet whenever they access a page with the comment form. In case, if a user’s browser automatically downloads such a file then the plugin sets a cookie that helps them identifying them as legit users.
Block Spam Bots Using Honeypots
Honeypot technology is one of the most effective methods to trick spambots into identifying themselves. To have such a facility, one needs to install and activate the WP spam fighter. As a result, this will add a hidden form to the comments area that is only visible to the bots.
Add Captcha To Reduce WordPress Spam
This plugin enables the re-captcha challenge on the comment forms. Recaptcha provides an image containing characters and users need to type those characters to prove that they are human. As re-captcha is an effective way of blocking spambots but it does nothing to prevent the site from manual spam comments. But a concern is that they make it hard to handle for the users to submit the comments. Still, it is the best choice to avoid spambots.
Remove Website URL From The Comment Form
The URL field in the comment form not only attracts the spammers but also invites those people who have no interest in any discussion at all. Normally, these comments contain a line or two of irrelevant nonsense. The name of the author will contain a keyword or a combination of a real name with keywords like Sally from Dunder Mifflin, or Jhon SEO consultants, etc.
Disable Comments On Media Attachments
WordPress automatically creates attachment pages for certain images where users can see an image and can leave a comment for it. In case, you are linking your images to the attachment page then you will have lots of attachments pages with comments on them. For any condition, if you don’t allow the users to comment on images instead of posts then one needs to turn off the comments on the media attachment.
Disable HTML Comments
An important handy tip to reduce WordPress spam and discourage the links is disabling the HTML in comments. And the easiest way to have this feature is by using Peter’s literal comments plugin. One can have all the benefits as any comment submitted to the site will get all HTML parsed through WordPress filters. This will change the existing double quotes, less than and greater signs into the HTML entities.
Less Annoying Captcha
The captcha should be less annoying as much as possible because many users find captcha a disruptive activity to deal with. There can be many alternatives for the captcha such as Maths quiz plugin that need the users to solve the simple Mathematics problem to prove that they are human. Such plugins enable you to modify the comment from the CSS though in most of cases you wouldn’t need to do so. Such a feature enables you to choose where you want an image or simply plain text quiz. With the pros, it may have cons too as plain text quiz is easy to read but also an easy task to solve by spambots.
We have mentioned vital tips that can help us to reduce WordPress spam. If you are interested in having more information about the same in detail, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. We will be always ready to help you out in your technical challenges and will be more than happy to serve you.
