FORGIVE THE MESS


I'M JUST TIDYING UP

Getting Rid of WordPress Spam

September 1st, 2010

As I mentioned in the previous rant, I get more spam comments than I do any other kind of interest on my blog. All that is set to change. I hope. At least, if I can’t get any legitimate visitors interested in my site, maybe I can reduce the amount of spam.

Every day I’ve been receiving a handful of comments with messages such as “Great article, I read with much interest, please. I add to bookmark and make many recommendation for your brilliant insights. Please check out someshadywebsite.ru and get Viagra for night out with Russian Girls at Online Casino.” Some of the comments are more discreet as far as their intentions are concerned and at a glance it is hard to differentiate between the more obvious spam and those which attempt to sneak their trackback link past me by writing something as simple as “Great article, thanks for the info.” This makes managing comments a real pain in the arse.

The way my site analytics are looking, nobody is posting any legitimate comments anyway, so I might be tempted to just delete or mark all as spam without even so much as a glance. But wait, there are two – yes TWO genuine comments on my blog – one from a friend and the other from someone at Axure Software Solutions saying thank you for my post about the Axure Wireframe and Prototyping Tool. And since I have just reaffirmed my vow to keep this site current with interesting and inspiring content, well I figured I had better do something about this comment-spam conundrum. Like I said, even if I don’t get more genuine traffic, at least I can cut down on the number of messages I need to weed through.

I’ve heard people talking about Akismet before, but until today I had not enabled it in my WordPress Plugins. Now it’s up and running and I hope to see a significant reduction in the number of spam comments appearing in my WordPress dashboard. Aside from enabling Akismet, well I also came across a post which provides some more insight into the methods that hackers/spammers are using in their mission to exploit and piss-off people who are forced to work honest jobs. The article – Top 10 ways to stop spam in WordPress I found very informative and I intend to explore some of the other methods. For the time being though let’s see how Akismet measures up.

5 Responses to “Getting Rid of WordPress Spam”

  1. # Robinon 20 Jun 2011 at 6:03 pm

    Look! A legitimate comment! I mean, uh, please you come to my casino in Russia!

    Seriously though, Akismet is great – at least from my experience. I used to get tons of these on my blog and now I very, very rarely have to even worry about these.

    How did it work out for you? Are you an Akismet fan now?

    Cheers,
    Robin

  2. # Richon 27 Jun 2011 at 9:49 am

    Hi Robin, thank you for visiting :)

    I can’t remember the last time I received a spam comment. Akismet definitely rocks!

    Just checking out your site now. Nice photos.

    P.S. You forgot to provide a link to your casino in Russia. ;)

  3. # Richon 27 Jun 2011 at 9:51 am

    Had to edit that. Saw your flickr stream about 20 seconds later ;)

  4. # Richon 27 Jun 2011 at 9:59 am

    And now I realize we’re already contacts. It’s Monday. :S

  5. # Robinon 28 Jun 2011 at 8:01 pm

    Iz okay. We Russians – very forgiving. ;)

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