6 Plug-ins to Avoid Spam Comments

by Deepa Ranganathan Content Writer

If you have a Wordpress website, you may have noticed the comments' bulk that you receive every now and then. Some of it is genuine while others are spam. While genuine comments improve the ranking of your website, spam can reduce or even nullify the credibility of your company. It is not good to receive too many spam comments in a go. You will need to end the spam before it spoils the reputation you have worked so hard on. Getting a good anti-spam plug-in is a decent solution that you may consider to avoid spam comments on your website.

Your first step before loading the anti spam plug-in should be to configure discussion settings for your website. You will need to go to http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php to configure the necessary settings.

One way of ending spam on your website is to deal with each and every comment manually. Here you will be spending most of your time trying to judge the comments and then individually marking them as spam. Won't that be a waste of time?

Instead of manually accepting, you can automatically accept the first comment from individual users. Sorting spam from this lot would be easier, and you can always block the users who throw in spam comments easily with this method.

One other method of avoiding spam is to ask members to sign up before they comment. But, even this method cannot actually control spam; you will find spammers actually signing in. With this method, you might lose out on the comments from the public who have not signed up. Ideally till your blog picks up, you will need public registrations, which simply means you will need to turn off member registrations.

Check your commenting policy on the discussion settings, and you will be able to avoid receiving spam all the while. Apart from that, there are plug-ins that you can install to your wordpress website which will prevent entry of spam onto the website.

Akismet

Generally this plug-in used to be installed with your Wordpress website. In case you don't have it installed to your Wordpress website, installing it would help prevent spam. This plug-in works on every comment you receive on your website. Every comment is cross checked with the spam database, and the comments that are established as spam will be delivered to the spam folder of your Wordpress website. This plug-in does not offer complete safeguarding against the spam comments, as that one odd spam comment might enter your website. Sometimes, genuine comments get marked as spam by this plug-in. It is always easy to go to the folder and select the comments and mark them as not spam. Having said this, the plug-in has established an accuracy of 95% in declaring comments as spam.

WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam

This plug-in majorly deals with registration as well as comments spam that hampers your website's credibility. With this plug-in, you don't need a captcha code to deal with spam, or remove comments that can be classified as spam. You get comment blacklisting benefits with this plug-in. You will easily know if a person posting comments to your website is using proxy or not, and can disable such people from posting comments. In short, with this plug-in you can block the background spam that disturbs the credibility of your website.

Antispam-Bee

With this plug-in you avail access to great many anti-spam tools as well as filters. You will be able to practice rigid policies that will protect the website against spam with this plug-in. Let's say there are comments with BB code; you can easily regard them as spam comments and not include them in your website. You can also prevent comments coming from certain countries or regions with this plug-in. you can set cleaning of spam database to auto mode. Basically, with this settings you will notice that the spam folder gets cleared automatically based on the days set.

Growmap Anti Spambot

With this plug-in, you have an inclusion that asks you to confirm that you are not a spammer. Checking this box will reduce the number of spam comments. In case the user does not check this box then their comments will not be added. With this plug-in, you will get few other spam identification tools too. This helps control the amount of spam as most of the comments go through moderation before they are added to the post. In case a particular person's comments are still being moderated, their comments will not be added. This is also a method of identifying spam.

Anti-Spam by CleanTalk

Anti-Spam helps control spam bots without using the captcha code method. It has included a trap that will capture the bots and remove comments coming from them. There are two hidden areas generated by the plug-in within the form to capture the bots. One is the date area that is taken care of by JavaScript and the other is an empty field. It is one of the easiest ways to trick spam bots, and the success rate of this plug-in is good.

AVH- Very First Defense against Spam

With this plug-in you can compare the IP of the person posting comments with the spam database. This way you can easily exclude the people spamming and posting comments that can affect the credibility of your website. You will also get the IP details of hackers using this plug-in.

Deepa, a technical writer with Semaphore Software, who now devotes her time in advising its clients to hire dedicated wordpress developers. She offers information as well as tips and latest trends in this domain. Her love for reading helps her constantly provide latest information on different technical and design aspects of WordPress