Around the time you finish setting up your WordPress blog—or not until a day or two later, if you’re lucky—you’ll start getting “comment spam.” Comment spam is a stream of mostly nonsensical comments left on your blog in the hope of routing traffic to the spammers’ target sites. The comments contain links to those sites. They’re counting on finding blogs on which comments aren’t moderated, leave their links, and drive up their own search engine rankings. Most of the spammers seem to employ software robots to drop their loads of unwanted canned meat in your comment threads. But there are also humans who engage in this tacky form of self‑promotion, plugging their porn sites on your blog about needlepoint, for instance. (Posting legitimate, relevant comments with backlinks to a site about a related topic, on the other hand, is perfectly cool.)
Fortunately, WordPress comes loaded with a strong defense against comment spam. It’s a plugin called Akismet, and it’s provided by Automattic, the same folks who supply the WordPress software itself. The plugin checks new comments from unknown users against a database of known spam sources. To activate Akismet, you need to register with WordPress.com and obtain an API key—a password that tells the Akismet servers that a request for data is coming from a legitimate WordPress user. It’s free and easy to obtain.
Comment form with CAPTCHA feature
Akismet quarantines everything that it suspects is spam, so you need to take a look from time to time to make sure that no legitimate comments get caught in the filter. But I’ve been using Akismet for a couple of years, and it hardly ever makes a mistake.
If you don’t want to bother with moderating your comments, or if you just want a second line of defense against comment spam, you can install a plugin to add a CAPTCHA feature to your comment form. (I’ve had good results with one called SI CAPTCHA Anti‑Spam.) This will prevent robotic agents from posting any comment spam to your site. But only your attention will stop the human shameless self‑promoters.
What Is All This Salty Pink Meat Doing in My Blog Comments?
Fortunately, WordPress comes loaded with a strong defense against comment spam. It’s a plugin called Akismet, and it’s provided by Automattic, the same folks who supply the WordPress software itself. The plugin checks new comments from unknown users against a database of known spam sources. To activate Akismet, you need to register with WordPress.com and obtain an API key—a password that tells the Akismet servers that a request for data is coming from a legitimate WordPress user. It’s free and easy to obtain.
Comment form with CAPTCHA feature
Akismet quarantines everything that it suspects is spam, so you need to take a look from time to time to make sure that no legitimate comments get caught in the filter. But I’ve been using Akismet for a couple of years, and it hardly ever makes a mistake.
If you don’t want to bother with moderating your comments, or if you just want a second line of defense against comment spam, you can install a plugin to add a CAPTCHA feature to your comment form. (I’ve had good results with one called SI CAPTCHA Anti‑Spam.) This will prevent robotic agents from posting any comment spam to your site. But only your attention will stop the human shameless self‑promoters.