Dealing With Wordpress Comment Spam

Comments is a great way to engage your readers

 
Posting articles on your Wordpress site is the first step in drawing attention to the information you wish to communicate. The goal is to then have people read that information and continue to return to your site. One of the ways to do that is an effort to cause people to place comments on articles written. You can do that in a variety of ways such as asking a question at the end of an article. If you spend time trying to engage people in conversations and are successful, you will more than likely end up with comments which one would consider spam. A lot of these kinds of comments are there strictly in an effort to get links back to another site. This usually happens after they are successful in posting some comment about how they stumbled on your site. If that one is successfully showing in the comments, they follow up with comments containing links back to their site and selling products.

You can find a number of sites which will define what spam can be considered as, so the next question becomes how to deal with it. There are a variety of methods and tools which will handle most of the unwanted comments. If you have installed the Akismet plugin on your site, it will automatically catch these kinds of comments and identify them as spam. If you have not installed the plugin, stop reading this right now and get it installed. It is a fantastic tool and one that should be on every Wordpress site you ever work with. If you have installed it previously and seen what it can do for you, you already know the value of Akismet.

Beyond that, there are several other methods you can employ to attempt to cut down on spam. One of the big problems is automated processes which populate comments on sites where the comments are open and available for entry. These automated processes can be foiled by using Captcha as a process against those machine entered comments. There are a variety of different Captcha methods out in the world, but for now, we are talking about those associated with handling comments being entered.

The ones that many are familiar with are ones that display a dynamically generated graphic which has letters and numbers in them. As part of adding a comment, the person (or computer) would have to enter the values which are contained in the graphic. These are supposed to not be machine readable, meaning that the computers trying to automatically add comments are not able to read them. For the most part this is a true statement and should block just about every automated comment. Unfortunately, as computers get more sophisticated in the programs reading the generated graphic, they may be able to figure out what needs to be entered. I believe we are years away from that.

Another method is a form of Captcha where there is a use of pictures instead of characters to stop the machine added comments. In these situations, you have to click on a specific picture before the comment is added. This generally stops the automated comment processes from being able to post comments. There are a variety of different methods associated with this kind of Captcha.

A very low tech method of Captcha is one where you have to answer a question, such as adding 2 numbers together of something like that. The question that is being asked determines what you are supposed to be answering and works quite well. You see this on a lot on forums, especially when doing searches. This type has been around for a very long time and appears to be pretty effective.

Another possibility is to move your comments from Wordpress to Facebook. This is pretty straight forward and instructions to complete this are available. This forces people to have Facebook accounts to add comments to your posts. You would now be getting comments from real people and not from anonymous commentors. There are multiple benefits from this if you have a Facebook page set up for your business.

Of course, you can decide you do not want to allow for any comments on your site and turn them off all together. That removes this whole issue, but it does remove a method of engaging with your readers. There are many plugins to accomplish the task of trying to filter all the comments down to those which are legitimate ones. It does take a little bit of time to get these things set up correctly, but once done, you have quality comments on your posts.