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Fighting Evil Spam

April 26th, 2006

Spam has become a fact of life, both in our inboxes and now our blog comments. The really frustrating part is that they are automated. No person is actually typing it in, so you are fighting against a computer. We hate it as much as you do, so here’s some tips to help block it.

Wordpress comes with some built-in options to help. Go to your Options tab, and click Discussion. There’s a few ticky boxes there to help tos spam into moderation. I like to check off the box that says “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” so all new comment automatically go into moderation, but regular commentors go through. I also change the number of links down to 1. If you change it to 0, all comments go into moderation.

There is also a Comment Moderation list and a Comment Blacklist. Type (or copy/paste) words in a list that you never want to see in your comments, like certain drug names. Any comment that has a word in the Blacklist will automatically be deleted and you will never see it. We have a fairly decent blacklist that we use, so leave a comment or email us and we’ll add it to your backend or send it to you. (I wish there was a way to do this site-wide.)

I’ve added a couple of plugins to help as well. One is Auto-Close comments. Go to your Plugins menu, find it on the list and click the “activate” button. That’s it. This closes off the comments on entires more than 10 days old. A frequent spam tactic is to leave comments in the archives.

Another plugin I’ve just added is Spam Karma. Activate it, and it will start eating spam. You need to go to the Manage page to periodically clean out the spam.

If you really want to tighten your circle and limit comments to just members at our site, you can go to Options->General and tick the box that says “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”. You will also need to add members as users to your blog. Go to Users->Authors & Users and Add a User From Community. This means *nobody* from outside homeschooljournal can comment and should be used as a last resort.

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