Just like a forum, a blog receives its own fair amount of spam. “Is there a real way to stop it?” Kinda, there are ways to reduce spam, but there is no absolute way to stop it. There are a lot of plugins and methods you can use to prevent this and today I’m going to share my methods to prevent those evil spam bots from commenting on your blog.
Like mentioned in the forum Edition of this series. Askimet is a pretty snazzy plugin for a blog. Askimet is probably the most used plugin to prevent spam on a blog, because it pings every comment someone makes to see if it would qualify as spam. Askimet has a dark side as it may qualify some posts as spam even though they can be completely legit comments.
Renaming wp-comments-post.php to something weird, but simple like “siteabbreviation-comments.php” will reduce a lot of spam. This simple fix works, because a lot of spam bots look for the specific file named “wp-comments-post.php” to make the comment. So, renaming it prevents them from leaving a comment. The only problem with this method is that you are going to have to update your theme for the new name.
Blocking Malicious Proxies from visiting your blog will reduce spam. This works because most bots are ran on a offshore proxies to prevent the user’s actual IP from being seen. So, blocking them will prevent the bot from accessing your blog.
This may not be an option for bigger blogs, but I have always set my blogs so that comments always have to be approved. This will allow you to inspect the comment before it is viewed by the public. If you would like to use this method all you have to do is sign into your blog and click the little check box next to “An administrator must always approve the comment” in settings -> Discussion.
This in my opinion is a last resort. I myself don’t like doing this as Im sure someone doesn’t want to sign-up to make a comment. Making a person sign-up to make comments will prevent bots from commenting as a lot of them don’t have the ability to sign up.
Those are the easiest ways to prevent spam and they all have worked excellently in the past and I’m sure they will in the future. So, what are your methods to prevent comment spam? Do they work?
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