Spam comments are becoming frustrating for many WordPress users. It is a very common thing to receive a bulk amount of spam comments in a weekly manner on your WordPress website. Such spam comments are harmful for the reputation of your website among the followers and readers of your site. The bad scenario is that there is no complete solution to prevent your website from getting spammed. Disabling the comments is not the appropriate solution, but you can reduce the number of spam comments appearing on your website by proper configuration of your site.
Most of the WordPress users are unable to manage the spam comments and hence they lose key visitors of their site. In order to protect your WordPress from being affected by spam, you should work on improving the security of your website. This article gives some tips to tackle with spam comments in WordPress.
Manage comments from WordPress settings
In the Discussion setting section of your WordPress dashboard, you will see a “Before a comment appears” option. With the help of this option, you can manage the comments appearing on your website. You can either send the comments to the moderation queue or make them automatically posted on your site. From the option “Comment must be manually approved”, you can approve the different comments on your site manually. You get complete control of comments to be published on your site. This is a useful setting to stop publishing spam comments in WordPress.
Also, there is another better option to manage spam comments in WordPress. The option – “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” gives you the way to review the commenter who is interested in commenting on your posts. Through this option, you can send the first comment of the commenter to the moderation queue. If their comment gets approved, then all of their next comments will be automatically published.
Stop enabling comments on the older posts
You can disable the comment option from the older posts of your site. The Discussion settings page gives you the option to turn off or disable comments on your older posts. The “Other comment settings” shows a number of different options. There is an option entitled “Automatically close comments on articles older than ‘dash’ days.” You need to fix the number of days in that option and tick the checkbox. Don’t forget to save the changes you are doing to disable the functionality of comments on your older blog posts.
The Comment Blacklist Section
WordPress offers extreme security solutions for your website against hacking, threats, spamming, and other vulnerabilities. It gives you an easy way to blacklist the spam comments. There can be IP addresses that aim to damage your WordPress website. You can blacklist the commenters who want to perform some suspicious activities on your website. WordPress offers you the easy way to blacklist them by name, email ID, URL, and content. The Comment blacklist option shows a blank area for text. You can enter the IP address or any other data about the commenter and the source of spam comments which you want to blacklist in that space.
Anti-Spam Plugin
It would be an effective solution to use an anti-spam plugin to prevent the posting of spam comments on your site. There are lots of anti-spam plugins but, Akismet is one of the best plugins that identifies the spam comments easily on your site. Furthermore, this plugin is powerful enough to determine the spam comments in WordPress before they appear on your website in real time.
Also, you can customize the .htaccess file and insert a specific code in it that prevents the occurrence of spam on your website.
Wrapping up
To make a strong, powerful, and long-lasting online presence of your business, it is important to stop the spam comments appear on your website. The above tips are really helpful in preventing your website from any illegal spam threats. With the help of the above tips, you can easily stop the spam comments in WordPress. You just need to have access to the dashboard of your website and knowledge regarding the discussion settings.
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