Email Spam - Image by mray via flickr
WordPress is quite popular but with its popularity, we get to face another problem, spam!
What Are Spam?
Spam is a collection of unsolicited bulk messages.
For blogs, spam comments are unsolicited comments that are not required and not useful whose only purpose is to promote the spammer’s website or product.
Spammers usually use bots (automated programs, not robots!) to leave comments on blogs to get backlinks to their websites for free.
This hurts you, the blog owner and your blog in a number of ways.
First, you lose points in eyes of Google and your Page Rank may go down. Second, you may lose visitors because of bad comments.
How To Control Spam?
Most effective way to block spam is by filtering it yourself.
But hey, if we had time to filter every spam message, there would have been no problem like this in first place. So, we’d better use WordPress’s most beautiful aspect for it.
And it is……
Extensibility
Why not install plugins that can automatically filter spam for you?
Here are some of the best plugins for this job:
- Akismet: I’m not providing any download link for it because it is a super secret plugin that can only be accessed by an invitation only group (whose invitation can be bought from me for $999.99
). OK fine, you know that it comes pre-installed with every WordPress blog. Install it, get your Akismet key by registering at WordPress.com and it will take care of most of the spam. - Spam Free WordPress: This plugin claims to block 100% of comment spam. It generates a password for every post that anonymous users have to copy and paste into password field while registered users do not have to do anything like that.
- AVH First Defense Against Spam: This plugin checks user’s IP address against Project Honeypot database to verify if the IP address belongs to a spammer or not.
- Block Spam By Math Reloaded: This plugin uses a simple math question to block spammers. This makes sure that bots can’t leave any spam on your blog.
