How To Deal With SPAM Comments On Your Blog

I’ve been getting an increased amount of reports of people getting a lot of spam comments on their blog. So, I’d like to share some possible solutions with you on how to manage that.

1. Akismet Anti-Spam

This is by far the best, most complete solution to spam problems on your blog, and the first step you should take if you’re experiencing trouble.

Akismet is a plugin maintained by WordPress that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically mark the more obvious spam messages so that you don’t have to get email notifications of them all. It’s already installed on everyone’s blog, but it’s not set up. To set it up, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your dashboard.

2. In the left menu, find the “Settings” menu, and under that, choose “Akismet Anti-Spam”

3. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up an Akismet account. When given the option, choose the “Name Your Price” account. You can name $0 as your price.

The reason this excellent feature isn’t turned on by default is that it’s only free for individuals, and not organizations, so each individual needs to turn it on for themselves if they need it.

If you have any trouble, please write me at blog_support@ntm.org or visit the Ethnos360 Blogs Team’s “Support” channel so that other blog owners can benefit from the discussion.

2. Discussion Settings

If Akismet is insufficient, or you choose not to use it, there are several settings you can tweak to make the spam more manageable. Note that while Akismet uses ever-evolving algorithms to decide what is spam and what is not, these options are a lot more inflexible, which makes them better in certain situations.

To start, log in to your dashboard. Then go to Settings > Discussion. On that page are all the settings regarding comments. Here are some specifics on limiting spam

1. Close comments on old posts. As a post gets older and older, there will generally be less humans looking at it (people don’t tend to dig through old posts) and more bots finding it (the longer a post is published, the more bots will find it). This behavior is why the Automatically close comments on posts older than ___ days option exists. Depending on your blog traffic, you might set this to as long as a year (better for low traffic blogs) or as short as a few days (for blogs with a lot of readers and a lot of bot attention). You’ll need to tweak this option based on how old your posts tend to get before receiving spam and how long you want your posts to remain open for humans to comment on.
2. Hold comments for moderation. Next to the “Before a Comment Appears” heading are two options:
   1. Comment must be manually approved. This option is the safest way to make sure spam never appears on your blog, because you will have to manually approve every single comment before it appears. This won’t decrease the number of emails you get about spam comments, but will at least stop them from going live on your site.
   2. Comment author must have a previously approved comment. This option works the same as the first except that once you’ve approved someone’s comment, any future comments they post will skip the moderation step. This works almost as well as the first option on blocking spam from appearing on your live site, though there are some ways spam bots can get around it. This is generally considered the “sane” option, where option one is more of the nuclear option. If you only get a small amount of real comments, the first option is a little more effective.
3. Block Keywords. If you find you’re getting a lot of spam that contains a word that no real commenter on your site is likely to use (like a drug name or specific product), this option can help a lot. There are two text fields where you can enter one word/phrase per line:
   1. The first field, “Comment Moderation,” will hold any comments that match the keyword for moderation, awaiting your approval (This is unnecessary if you’re already holding all comments for moderation using “Comments must be manually approved” above).
   2. The second, “Disallowed Comment Keys,” Will put any matching comments in the trash so that you don’t have to deal with them at all. This is the more effective and dangerous one. If you get a lot of spam with the word Advil, you can block that word, but if a genuine person comments “Oh, what a hard day, I hope you had some Advil!” That comment will be trashed and you may never see it. Other drug names like “cyclosporine” are safer to block because the odds of a genuine comment on a missionary blog using that word are downright astronomical.
      

Again, if you have any trouble implementing these or continue to have spam problems after setting all these up, please write me at blog_support@ntm.org or visit the Ethnos360 Blogs Team’s “Support” channel and ask there so that other blog owners can benefit from the discussion.

Good hunting!