Combatting comment spam

When it comes to WordPress admin tasks I’m not greatest which is why I use ManageWP to automate some of the jobs for client sites that I manage.

On my personal blog, I do like to log in and carry out some tasks personally. Take comment spam for instance, once in a while I like to check to make sure real comments aren’t getting caught in the spam net. I usually give up after the first 100 though as I use Akismet to block spam and it does its job well.

Comment spam is typically made up of some gibberish text and several URLs pointing to the spammer’s website. A lot of spam is from people trying to get you to click their affiliate links. Whatever the reasons they do it, spammers are annoying.

Don’t take spam personally

Reading through some of the spam can be disheartening: to think that someone has commented on your well-crafted piece of work with gibberish that bears no relation to what you have written about but don’t take it personally. Spammers don’t have to visit your site to spout their trash, they use automated scripts that look for certain variables and inject their desired text into those fields.

Deleting spam quickly

ManageWP does a good job of deleting comment spam with the push of a button but there are other automated tools you could use.

As I said, I use Akismet to manage spam and it’s very accurate. Spam that is older than 15 days is automatically deleted and you can tell Akismet to auto-delete the worst of the spam so that you don’t’ have to see it. You can also set it to delete spam after x amount of days.