Towards A Spam-Free WordPress Blog

Although the internet with its various tools has made life and business so much easier to conduct on a day to day basis, there are some associated undesirable elements that sometimes rear their ugly heads and cause unnecessary anguish. Everyone who communicates through emails and maintains websites and blogs are now so familiar with the term ‘spam ‘ and doing their utmost to block it, that it makes one wonder if the spammer thinks if what he or she is doing is really worth it. Spamming in the most simplest of terms means gate-crashing or trying to sneak in where not required or invited. This is especially the case with a website/blog powered by some popular software such as WordPress. Let’s then take a look at some simple and easy solutions to ward off these intruders.

There are several ways in which one can block or filter this kind of trash from the original content and maintain its integrity. The simplest way to prevent spam from flooding your blog is by installing an anti-spam plugin. There are a number of plugins available that are compatible with WordPress blogs. Most of them are available for free and work just fine. But it is important to choose just the right kind; one that serves the purpose and is going to add some value to your blog.

Blogs when open for all to see on the web are also an open invitation to spam comments. The basic thing you need to do as a WordPress blog owner is to restrict comments only to registered users. Most of the time, spammers uses automated bots to post thousands of comments on your old posts and create quite a mess of the whole thing. You can use the option of limiting comments to a default number of days and have the rest of them turned off the blog. Say for example if you set the default number of days to 14 , it will turn off the comments on posts that are older than 14 days, which means no more spam comments posted by automated bots and no pingback spam either.

Akismet is one of the most popular spam filtering plugin which is available for WordPress blogs. This is available on installation of all new blogs and it just needs to be enabled. This plugin is an effective spam watchdog.  I have it installed on my blog and so far I am quite happy with the plugin.

Even if you have already installed an anti-spam plugin, you can still go in for an additional layer of spam control by using comment captcha codes. With comment captchas visitors have to enter a series of alphabets or numericals for posting a comment. This can help eliminate spam posted via automated bots since those captchas can only be entered by humans.  Check out the SI Captcha plugin.  This captcha anti-spam plugin for comments works alongside Akismet. I have not yet put in a captcha plugin for my blog as Akismet is working out.  However, it might be something worth looking into in the near future.

Having uninvited guests over is never a pleasant experience. Luckily in web space you at least have the choice of keeping them at bay, so why not make the best use of it and keep your blogs as spam-free as you possibly can.