Having spam comments on your blog is a problem for so many reasons. These spam comments can destroy the user experience on your live blog. Not only one or two spam comments are being received by the bloggers, there are hundreds of them and it is such a pain to go through them each day just to take them down. It will never stop whether they are moderated or not, automated or made by some real people with their own agendas.
But of course, in every problem there is a solution or perhaps a couple of solutions. Go and read them below:
1. An Akismet Plugin. When running a blog, it is a must that you install, activate and train your Akismet plugin. Akismet plugin is available in WordPress to defend your blog from spam comments. Train your Akismet plugin so that it will consistently flag spam comments.
Here’s how to activate your Akismet Plugin:
> Go to your Wodrpress Dashboard then choose Plugins
> You can see AKISMET there and click on the activate link
> Sign up for an API key.
> Go to Akismet Setting page in WordPress and type your API Key.
2. Close your comment section. If you don’t want any spammers lurking on your blogs, close the comment box. Or if you want, close the comment box for older blog posts, let’s say more than two months, because they are the one which are indexed by Google and spammer will most likely to find it.
3. Use of GASP Plugin. GASP stands for Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. It adds a check to blog comment form confirming if they are not spammers before submitting the comment. This box will appear on each and ever blog post of yours.
4. Moderated Comments. Do not allow people or spammers to publish their comments quickly. Configure your blog comment setting and put all comments in moderation queue so you can check all comments if they are relevant to your blog post or merely a spam.
5. Require the readers to register on your blog. Most of the time, people are lazy to register just to put a comment unless they are real people with real interest on what you wrote. Require anyone who wants to comment on your blog so that it will decrease the growth of spam comments.
6. Choose blog posts that allow comments. It is not necessary that you open the comment form on every blog posts you make. Like if you are publishing a newsletter, you can uncheck the Allow Comments box to avoid getting spam comments. Just remember to allow comments if you want an interaction on a particular blog post.
7. Use Math Protection or CAPTCHA. Using these methods, it requires the readers to take an action to prove if he/she is a human. Otherwise, it’s a spam robot. But sometimes (a rare case, so don’t worry), these plugin generate strange words or math problems like Square root or worse is trigonometric functions.
8. Do Not Allow Comments. Yes, fellow bloggers, this is 100% sure to keep away from spam comments on your blog. Some bloggers only focus on writing a very helpful content to the readers and they don’t care if there are no comments on it because he/she choose to close the comment form at all. With all the suggested ways, this is the best way you can do to reduce spam comments. Plus, you won’t exhaust yourself from deleting all those spam comments on your blog.
Spam comments are inevitable but you can always make a way to get rid of them. Happy blogging!
Photo Credit: Wikimedia/Tokyoship
