GKauten Consultingv1.2

Just a small post today as I am currently buried in excessive amounts of other work right now. I will however expand upon this post as time serves until it eventually becomes a relatively well rounded entry. However, for the time being I am going to share just a quick bit of information with you on how to slow down the amount of spam you receive on your WordPress blog.

Method 1:

There is a lovely little plugin that comes with every version of WordPress called “Akismet”. This is the resident spam catcher for WordPress blog comments. In order to use this plugin though you must first head over to the WordPress.Com world and register for an account. Once you have done so you can then retrieve your WordPress API key which allows the plugin to sync in to the WordPress system to analyze each comment and determine if a comment resembles spam or not. Sometimes there are some comments that slip into the spam section which shouldn’t be there, but approving them is as simple as can be and you would be quite amazed at the number of spam comments this plugin catches. For the month of July alone, it trapped 71 spam comments without even thinking twice about it.

Method 2:

When you setup your blog, inside the administration panel there are a few lovely options we can play with. If you click on “Settings” and then go down to the “Discussion” menu you will see what I am about to discuss. Your first option is to disable comments altogether. This check box is about the third one down depending on your version, though I am not sure it has ever moved across the various versions. Of course you may not always want to completely turn off comments because it is nice to have your users interacting with your posts and other users. So, the other option here is to require users to register before being allowed to post comments. In most cases spam artists will not bother registering for a site to post their links and most likely only know your site through the eyes of an automated spam bot anyways. Thus forcing registration will most likely deter the average spammer. Alternatively if you would like to enable comments and not force people to register then method 2 might be your better option.

Method 3:

There is a little thing called CAPTCHA, based off of the word capture, which requires a human captured response in order to submit a form. By now I am sure we have all seen one of those little boxes with the words, letters, or numbers all squiggled out in some random pattern that you have to get just right or else the form will not submit. This is what CAPTCHA is. Adding something like this to your comment or registration form forces an actual human to be the one submitting the form, thus eliminating the ability for a spam bot to post content on your website. Luckily for all WordPress users out there, you have no need to go and tear apart your theme files and whatever else to try and get this onto your website. There is a lovely little plugin that does it all for you instead, gracefully integrating with the comment form as well as the registration form. The plugin is called “WP-reCAPTCHA” and is readily available from this link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/. Alternatively with the new system built into WordPress you can go to the “Add New” section of the “Plugins” menu in your administration panel and install the plugin directly over the internet. (Isn’t technology awesome!) Just so I cover my bases a little bit here, the plugin is based on the web based reCaptcha system which provides direct access or plugins for other popular web based software as well. Lastly, the plugin was developed by Jorge Pena so if you feel like doing a little exploring you can check him out at Blaenk Denum.

Anyways, just a few quick pointers to help slow down the amount of spam you see fly across your blog so you can hopefully spend more time posting and interacting with users than you do clicking the delete button for bogus comments. I will try to expand this post as time allows.