MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

Spam Spam Go Away

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Everyone who has a blog knows that pain of dealing with spam comments and trackbacks. Of course, the more popular the blog is the higher the spam content it may receive each day. For this blog, I think it has about 3000 spam comments caught by Akismet since it started last May. Now while Akismet does a very nice job of catching spam comments from your blog, we cannot ignore the fact that we still always double check it, in case it catches false postives. Right? Although normally the rates are very low then and it seems that Akismet has improved so much since the day it started.

So here now I am going to show you other guides/tips that can help you fight and reduce spam on your blog:

  1. Comment-Timeout – I am pretty surprised not a lot of people use this plugin but what this plugin does is simply close the comment form of the blog posts that are older than 3 months or so. You can set it to whatever you may wish for but certainly its a nice plugin that helped me reduce the number of spams I receive every day. Comment-Timeout is a nice plugin I swear!
  2. Hold a Comment if it has 1 link! – Now this is what i have just learned last month. Basically there will come a time a guy will follow you and comment genuinely. In wordpress, upon approving the comment of a certain guy/email, it basically just accepts each and every comment of that guy then. So after quite some time, the spammer then use that to spread spam links on my blog and fortunately I thwarted him before he could do so much. Always hold a comment for moderation if it contains a link!
  3. Use the Comment Moderation Box – In the settings of your discussion in wordpress admin, you’ll see a semi-sized box wherein you can put ip, emails and etc. What you might want to put here is the list of proxies provided by TOR. You can also search for other open proxy ips and try to list them as well. Proxy is a great way to surf anonymously but oh boy spammers just take advantage of it so well!
  4. Wp-ban – This is another wordpress plugin and it does display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url trys to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too. I don’t use it here, but if you have a very popular blog or maybe you are the target of the spammers, then it can be useful.
  5. Trackbacks – trackbacks are one easy way to spam and spread links on other people’s site. What happens is that spam blogs will send a trackback to you w/your own content. Before I wasn’t aware w/it, so I just approve every trackbacks I receive. You must always take a look at a site before accepting their trackspams!

So that’s it. What you will find out is that most of the solutions are just inside wordpress itself. If you know a little programming then you expand things more depending on your knowledge. Just always back up! 🙂

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. I love Akismet. Unfortunately we will be fighting against spam for quite a while. I remember John Chow did 2 blog posts about wp-ban. Looks like it worked quite well for him except that it is possible that it could block an ISP IP address that could have real users.

    Akismet hasn’t failed me yet!

  2. Hey! Great tips 🙂
    Akismet is a life saver……

    “fortunately I thwarted him before he could do so much”
    Same thing happened on my blog!

  3. Oh yeah spam. I guess it’s the HIV of internet.

    Great post, and great list of plugins. I’m sure I gonna use wp – ban by the looks.

    Cheers,

    The Moneyac

  9. Very good anti-spam tips. The ‘timeout’ seems great, except for the fact that I like when people comment on my archives and I also have some posts that I’d need to remain open.

    As for the ‘IP ban’, that is so useful. I used to manually edit an .htaccess file to ban certain IPs, which clearly takes more work than just using a plugin. 🙂

    Shirley’s last blog post..Velvet Blues Is Now Comment Friendly!

  10. I don’t even check Askimet for false positives anymore. There’s just too many spam comments to sift through…not worth the time. I’m sure it catches a good comment here and there but overall I think its pretty accurate.

    Mike Collins’s last blog post..Sharing My Game Plan For 2009