9 Tips and Tools to Fight Spam in WordPress

Spam Comments are becoming a major issue now a days because more and more people are leaning towards spamming to get backlinks. Heck people are even paying spammers to spam with their url. Well are you tired of these spammers? I know I am. Over the past year, I dealt with tons of spam troubles because it seemed that a few spam comments would bypass the security anyways. So I thought I should compile a list of wordpress plugins, and tricks that I have learnt over the past to fight against spam comments in wordpress.

WordPress Tools to Fight Spam

1. Akismet

This is the dual sword that everyone should have in their possession. Each wordpress copy comes with this plugin by default. All what you have to do is get an API key from wordpress.com. Once you get the API, you are equipped with this weapon. Akismet really gets the job done. It catches over 350+ Spam / day on average for Balkhis. Without it, I don’t think I would be able to monitor the comments.

2. Defensio

Defensio is like an automated bow and arrow that is bound to hit the bull’s eye everytime in your fight against spam. Defensio have your comment traffic route through it’s system where it analyzes each comment for the level of spam, and assigns a grade. If the grade is of an adequate value then the comment is published, if the comment seems suspicious it will be held for your review. Defensio provides you with good stats and gives you RSS Feed for both good and spam comments.

3. Simple Captcha

Simple captcha does exactly what it sounds like. It adds a random image in your comment box which every user is required to enter. It fools the spammers. This is one of the most efficient ways to prevent spam, but this makes all of your users enter the captcha as well which might reduce your total comments on the site as well because most users get annoyed with the captcha system.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Simple Trackback Validation filters through your trackbacks and only show you the ones that are not spam. Not a long while ago, this technique started to get alot of buzz and it is now being used by alot of spammers. They make you think like they are linking to your post, but mostly either they are copying your entire post, or have a short link to your post in a porn page or something spammy like that.

5. Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior analyzes the HTTP headers, IP address, and other metadata regarding the request to determine if the comments are spammy or not. This is also very effective if you have Akismet installed. This is probably one of the better combos. Not to mention, this works on almost all php-based sites like drupal, and anything else.

6. Spam Karma

Spam Karma assigns a score to each comment using a specific rating system which includes the age of the post, email, their link and more. The developer has stopped developing this plugin and will not provide future support, so don’t expect any updates. Although I was told that this plugin works well.

7. WP Spam Hitman

This plugin lets you set a list of words that are in spam comments. But you must remember that these words are often used by your normal visitors also, so you can’t just blacklist these words. WP Hitman takes these words and analyze how many times they have been used, and if they have been used alot then it triggers it as spam. This might put your users comment in danger also, but sometimes to avoid spam, you have to this method for a shortwhile.

WordPress Tips to Fight Spam

Ok I have tried just about all of the below tricks that I am about to tell you, so you can use it. I will tell you the pros and cons of each, so you can make the judgement by yourself.

8. Comment Moderation and Blacklist

Moderating comments is a default function with wordpress. You can find it if you go in your admin panel if you click Settings tab and then discussion. I suggest you leave the url level to default. Use this feature only, if you find a certain person suspicious, you can put their IP in this list otherwise don’t add anything because you will be increasing the work load on yourself.

Blacklist option is right below the moderation area in Settings ~ Discussion. In this if you put down any email, IPs, or domains it would be blacklisted. You can blacklist a certain email, IP Address, or domain. The sad part is that they always find a way around. By adding more and more into this list you will hurt your loyal readers because their comment will go in Spam as well. I had this happen with me. So I try to avoid making the list bigger. Use with caution.

9. Nofollow Comments

Spammers target blogs that are dofollow. It was a big thing a while back. People would comment on every do follow blog, so bloggers would make their blog do follow in the hope of increasing the comments. Well, you will increase the amount of comments. But half of them would be spam. So the choice is yours. Most popular sites use nofollow. The reason for that is because it really doesn’t matter. Your comments get indexed anyways in the search engine and it counts as a backlink. You just don’t get the PR Juice (or some says).

Well here is how you can add a no follow to your comments.

Open this file: /wp-includes/comment-template.php

Look for the word External, and just add a no follow tag after it.

Some people might say that you are not being fair to your loyal users because you are no following their comments. That is why there is a top commentators widget which you can use to reward your top commentators by giving them a follow link from your site

I am sure most of you guys are already familiar with these tactics hopefully I added some more news. This is for starters or those who are still looking for more options. Believe me guys you get Akismet and add any one of these extra layers. You should be set.