Want to Get Rid of WordPress Blog Comment Spam? Two Plugins to Make That Happen
I don’t know about your blog, but for ours, submitted comment spam seems to be on the rise. It appears spammers still think it’s a good way to publicize their sites.
They’re certainly not getting better search ranking by doing this, as by default, all comments have a “nofollow” attribute. This tells search engines the links are not endorsed by the blog owner, and should not be considered actual links on the site.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to combat this spam…
Akismet Plugin – But you have to update it
The Akismet plugin for WordPress blogs is the de facto standard when it comes to destroying comment spam. Our previous blog post about the Akismet plugin covers the basics of setting it up.
If you want to get the most out of this plugin, you have to upgrade this plugin to the latest version. Why you ask? Because this new version contains a neat new feature… The Nonce.
The nonce feature is simply an invisible image that is passed to Akismet when a comment is submitted. The magic behind it is the automated comment spam bots cannot pass this image successfully in most cases. Akismet takes this into account when deciding if a comment submitted is spam or not.
Cookies for Comments – A second line of defense
Akismet is quite good, but it still lets through a small number of obvious spam comments each day. Even with the nonce feature enabled, some sophisticated bots can bypass it.
That’s where Cookies for Comments comes in handy. It requires that the commenter has cookies enabled to be able to successfully submit a comment. This, combined with Akismet, works quite well to stop the spam from getting through.
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I’ve seen Akismet doing a pretty good job as of late, but even with the Nonce feature enabled, it’s not a 100% spam trap. What have you seen on your blog? Is the Nonce feature making a difference? Any other methods for dealing with comment spam?
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Akismet has always worked great for me but I still moderate all my comments as what I get most these days are the generic, “Hey nice post” type comments which I suspect are human and not bots? Or created by apps. that people can use like ‘Comment Kahuna’ to find dozens of blogs in a related niche to their site and write one generic non specific comment (Usually complimentary) and then click to send it to all those blogs. Sometimes they can be hard to spot but my rule of thumb is that if the comment has zero bearing on the post it’s a link fishing exercise.
Clive,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, we are also forced to use comment moderation because of all the quasi-real “nice post” type of comments, or they grab the post title and work it into the nonsense comment.
The battle continues… 😉
Really Spam is increasing day 2 day, Akismet always did the best to block the spam. Anyway thanks for the Good Post.
[…] Want to Get Rid of WordPress Blog Comment Spam? Two Plugins to Make That Happen […]
“You state the truth in your comment I will link to it”.
I love the generic “You are right” comments, lately all spam I get are these bogus insane compliments that always happen to have a link to some dodgy site. I’m pretty sure lots of people accept those kind of comments just because, well, everybody likes to be told they are right.
My favorite spam comment so far that got past Akismet: On our post about Web Hosting and Digital “Landlords”:
“plumbing can really be a hardwork specially if you are not very skillfull in doing home plumbing”
😉