Getting fed up with spam comments on your WordPress? Fortunately, you are not alone. Additionally, spam comments are a great issue mostly when you are not prepared for it.
In this post, I will share with you the best WordPress comment spam and useful tips to deal with the WordPress spam comments. Also, the tips will save your precious time and will gradually remove comment spam from your WordPress blog.
Why there Lies the Requirement to Combat Comment Spam in WordPress?
Internet is filled with spam bots that spreads automated links for vicious websites in the mode of comment spam. In addition, these spam comments focusses on getting rank in search engines. And also, in getting accidental clicks from unknown visitors.
But bots do not provide all the spams. There are also real humans involved in the submission of spam comments. Moreover, these out of topic and badly written comments are difficult to catch and generally involves links connecting to third-party sites.
You should constantly monitor your website otherwise it would get published and become visible to both your search engines and actual users. However, this would badly affect your website’s image as users would think your website is a spam website.
Search engines can denote your site as dangerous if they discovered links to sites distributing viruses. Howsoever, for all these reasons combatting comment spam is necessary. Further, this will help you to focus on your online business rather than spending time on worrying about spam.
The following steps will ease out your way regarding spams in WordPress:
Keep the Comment Moderation in Turn On Mode in WordPress
Ascertain that every single comment on your site is published with your permission. This step will make sure that comments do not bypass any filters. Hence, giving you the full mastery over which comments to appear on your site.
For this, go to Settings and then click on Discussion. Next, scroll down to the section, “Before a comment appears” and confirm to check the box “Comment must be manually approved”. Also, do not forget to tap on the “Save changes” button to store the changes.
Now all your WordPress comments will require your permission to appear on your website.
Trigger on Akismet Anti-spam Protection
It is an anti-spam plugin which is free and comes pre-installed with WordPress. But you will need to sign up in obtaining the API key. Akismet filters all your WordPress comments with the help of their anti-spam database. It also picks out the most common forms of spam comments.
Adopt Sucuri
Sucuri is the best plugin for WordPress firewall. It permits you to block skeptical requests before reaching your website. In addition, it can also stop bots and scripts from submitting automatic comments. This lessens your server loads and receiving of your spam comments.
Use Honeypot so as to Catch Spam Bots
Honeypot technology is a great method for identifying spam bots. Once they are recognized you can block their comments.
For installation and activation of Antispam Bee, first of all go to Settings>Antispam Bee. Then click on the tick mark option to indicate spam for all honeypot captured comments. Store your settings clicking the ‘Save changes’ button.
Addition of Google reCAPTCHA Verification
reCAPTCHA is a progressive form of CAPTCHA which differentiates between robots and human users. Additionally, Spam bots can hardly bypass this technology as Google offers them a quite harder challenge.
Remove from Comment Form the Website URL
The URL section in the comment form attracts both the spammers as well as the people who have least or no interest at all in the discussion. All you need is, to add the below stated code to the WordPress theme, be it a site-specific plugin or a functions.php file.
function wpb_disable_comment_url($fields)
{
unset($fields[‘url’]);
return $fields;
}
add_filter(‘comment_form_default_fields’,’wpb_disable_comment_url’);
Dysfunction Media Attachments Comments
If images are not a core part of your content and you do not wish any comment on them, you need to turn off comments on media attachments. The simplest method to do this by installation of the Disable Comments plugin.
As it gets activated, go to Settings>Disable Comments and mark the box appearing next to ‘Media’ option.
Dysfunction HTML in Comments
You can use HTML in order to hide spam links in the comment section of WordPress. Just add the following code:
function wpb_comment_post( $incoming_comment )
{
$incoming_comment[‘comment_content’] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment[‘comment_content’]);
$incoming_comment[‘comment_content’] = str_replace( “‘”, ‘'’, $incoming_comment[‘comment_content’] );
return( $incoming_comment );
}
function wpb_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {
$comment_to_display = str_replace( ‘'’, “‘”, $comment_to_display );
return $comment_to_display;
}
add_filter( ‘preprocess_comment’, ‘wpb_comment_post’, ”, 1);
add_filter( ‘comment_text’, ‘wpb_comment_display’, ”, 1);
add_filter( ‘comment_text_rss’, ‘wpb_comment_display’, ”, 1);
add_filter( ‘comment_excerpt’, ‘wpb_comment_display’, ”, 1);
remove_filter( ‘comment_text’, ‘make_clickable’, 9 );
This code transforms HTML code into HTML bodies displaying as a code without interpreting by the browser.
Minimum & Maximum Comment Length
This is another method to reduce comment spam by using Commnet Hacks plugin to fix a minimum & maximum comment length.
Dysfunction Trackbacks
Disable trackback as for most of the blogs it is not mandatory to have enabled trackbacks. This will reduce your comment spam. You can do this by going to Settings>Discussion. This will disable trackbacks for your whole website.
Ending Note
Spam comments WordPress can easily mess up your site. It will make your website look unprofessional, moving real visitors away. However, cleaning up the clutter is really a challenging task. This is why you should put little effort in creating an anti-spam strategy.
I hope this post has helped you in obtaining advantageous tips and tools for reducing comment spam in WordPress.