How to Reduce Blog Comment Spam

Blogging is a popular pursuit for casual Internet users and online business owners alike. It provides an easy and convenient way for us to share out thoughts with the world at large.

Unfortunately, spammers have caught on to the popularity of blogging and adjusted their efforts accordingly. They have created “spambots” that go around to the blogs of unsuspecting bloggers, leaving irrelevant and nonsensical comments with links to sites of ill repute. There are, however, some precautions we can take to virtually eliminate comment spam on our blogs.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Blog
• Spam Filter

1. Install a spam filter if your blog is on its own domain and uses software that supports them. WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms, comes with Aksimet spam protection already installed. All you have to do is activate it, and it blocks the majority of spam comments.

2. Moderate comments. Virtually all blogging platforms have a feature that enables you to approve comments before they show up on your blog. Most will send you an email when a comment is held for moderation, so you don’t have to constantly check for them.

3. Set your blog up to disable comments after a post has been up for several days to a week if possible. The majority of spam comments are placed on posts that have been around for a while in an attempt to escape detection.

4. Require users to register before they can comment. Most spambots can’t get around this feature, and if they do you can simply remove the user associated with the comments. If your blog allows it, you could also implement a character recognition test in the comment form.

5. Block IPs that comment spam comes from. More will likely surface to take the places of the ones you’ve blocked, but it will help somewhat.

Tips & Warnings

• Start with the spam filter, and add the other methods one by one if they become necessary.
• If you use a spam filter, it will usually hold the messages for a specified amount of time. Check some of them periodically to see if legitimate comments are being filtered. If they are, you can usually label them as such and the filter will adjust itself accordingly.

Resources

• Akismet blog comment spam filter

[timmyjohnboy]

on 12/22/2008 One way to see if a comment being moderated is spam, try googling it. For example, if you get a comment that sounds generic like "I like your blog, I will come check it out every day for new posts", it's probably spam. Copy the post, or at least a significant portion of it, and paste it into google in quotes and see how many sites are listed. If there's a few, it's probably spam. Nice, huh?