Since WordPress is the de-facto standard in blogging, there are scores of tools designed specifically to populate spam comments on the platform.

They’re constantly on the hunt for blogs that have auto approved comments. Once they find hold of it, they exploit it to the hilt.

Here’s an example.

Even otherwise— spun, shady comments rule the roost.

Akismet is the go-to plugin for this. It comes preinstalled with WordPress. But you need to activate it.

Go to WordPress dashboard, look for Akismet, activate it and get the key.

Click on Activate Akismet.

Akismet will also ask you for a key which you will get once you create a WordPress.com account.

Or if you don’t have an Akismet key already proceed with account registration. Key will be mailed to your registered email id.

Activate the plugin with this key and you’re on your way to protecting your blog from spam comments.

Prior to me installing Akismet I always had trouble with many spammers commenting and I always had a huge trove of spam comments to send to trash. Akismet does a spectacular job of catching spam and very rarely do spam comments pass the filter and appear on the moderation queue. Isn’t it enough that a ton of comments don’t sit on your pending list.

The plugin protects your site from spammers landing on it.

Additional tips to fight comment spam

Honeytrap comment spammers

This technology is an effective way to up your chances of winning the fight against comment spammers. You need to install a plugin called WP Spam Fighter and activate it. Go to settings>> WP Spam Fighter and click to enable honeypot protection.

 

It uses two ways to fight spam one of which is based on behavior.

Human visitors spend a little time and read your post. Someone venturing to fill out the comment box in mere seconds after landing has to be a spammer or bot.

What it does is add an area that’s visible only to bots and not humans. And bots by default fill out all available forms making them fall for the trap and getting sent to the trash.

But this doesn’t protect you against people who manually fill out the comments section and link out to a spammy or malicious site. The protection is chiefly against bots.

The plugin is free to use.

Removing Website URL Field from Comment Form

The chief motivation behind spammers and spam bots scouring the web is to find easy targets where they can drop their link. The URL field attracts them.

Remove the URL field and you kill the interest.

Here’s what I am talking about.

There’s only the name and email fields and no URL box.

Not only spammers but people who can’t contribute anything useful to the blog post either. You might have seen those comments. They are barely a sentence in length and may begin on a congratulatory note explaining how useful the post is or how their brother in law recommended this site. At other times they may end the comment with a non-relevant question. Sometimes they’re very easy to recognize with the name used for commenting which is something followed by a keyword anchor.

In all such instances doing away with the URL field will discourage such people and bots from commenting on your blog.

There’s still the off chance of commenters plugging the URL in the comment box itself though and that needs manual intervention.

The next step will fool-proof your blog against that.

Disable HTML in comments

Doing this you can discourage spammers from polluting your comment box. If you disable html, they’d still drop links but won’t receive a backlink. There are plugins that help you with this.

Do a search, install and activate the plugin and comments submitted with HTML won’t show the parsed HTML but will get removed.

Turn of comments on older posts

WordPress comes with a default option built inside settings to close comments.

If you don’t know about it and want to access it Go to Settings » Discussion

You will find an option on scrolling down that says, ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than’ followed by the number of days.

You can set it to 14 days, 30 or more.

I’ve enabled the option and comments are disabled on all my older posts. I first saw it being done on the Problogger blog which has thousands of articles many of them written way back in 2008 to 2010.

 

Disable comments as a whole

Comments encourage discussion and is a vital tool for feedback but you might feel that it’s no longer contributing to discussions but is more of a spamming tool. In such cases you can disable commenting as a whole.

How?

Again with the discussion tab.

Go Settings » Discussion and uncheck the box next to ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’.

FAQ

What happens to comments labelled as spam

They go to the directory where spam comments are listed. You can delete all of them in batches or go through some and recover good ones if you so desire.

I see all comments going to moderation queue. Why?

In that case you must have a setting enabled. To fix this go to Discussion Panel>> Settings and see if the “An administrator must approve this” checkbox is ticked or not. Uncheck it. And from then on all comments won’t go to Administrator but all the spam comments will go to the spam box instead.