Spam comments on WordPress site: How you can handle them better?

A huge problem always stands in front of WordPress users that is comment spam. Usually, it’s not common for WordPress website to get numbers of spam comments every week and if you fail to tackle this level of spam then you can face a big damage regarding your reputations with readers and commentators. Although, it is necessary to tackle these spammers and to block their attempts of spamming your website.

Hopefully, facing spammers don’t need to be a time siping effort. If the configuration of your WordPress website is done perfectly and some strong anti-spam plugins are installed then it is possible to eliminate spam in a bulk from your website.

Let see some of the top rates tips and tools to tackle spam comments on your WordPress website.

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Turn Off Comments On Media Attachments

Without your permission, the image attachment pages are created by WordPress where users can see the images and can even comment on them. If your images are linking to the attachment page, then after a period of time you will see many attachment pages with comments enabled on them. If images are the vital part of your website or content, then there is no issue. But still, if you don’t want any comment on images by any user, just turn off comments on media attachments. Simple enough!

Eradicate Website URL field From Comment Box

Both humans, as well as bot spammers, are attracted to the URL field in the comment form and it also alludes to the people who have no interest in the discussion at all. Generally, these comments contain one or two line which contains nothing except nonsense, a keyword exists in the place of comment author’s name or a combination of the real name with the keyword. To get rid of this kind of behavior on your website, you need to discard the URL field from the comment form.

HTML Commenting Should Be Disabled

Disabling HTML in comments is a handy tip to discourage links in comments. The most simple trick to turn off this activity is to install a plugin that is Peter’s Literal Comments. After the installation, if any comments get submitted to your site, it will be analyzed through the WordPress filters and if any HTML links or double quotes, less than and greater signs are found, Peter’s Literal Comments blocks that particular comment.

Verification Through Captcha

To enable recaptcha verification on your comment forms, you can add WP-reCAPTCHA plugin. By installing this plugin, an image will be displayed to the users containing characters which they need to type to prove that they are human. Although recaptcha is a beneficial tool to block spam bots, at the other hand, it does nothing to stop manually submitted spam comments. Sometimes, it makes users face difficulties while submitting comments but at the same time it is quick as well as very effective in blocking automated spam comments.

Akismet

The most appreciated plugin of WordPress is Akismet. No extra downloading is necessary to download this plugin, it comes pre-installed with your WordPress kit. You just need to enable it to get an API key. Akismet catches spam comments and does a great job in completely eradicating them. But, sometimes good comments are also analyzed and filtered as a spam comment. However, you can still recover them by visiting your spam comments.

Figure out your own condition regarding WordPress website and choose the above mentioned anti-spam solutions accordingly. You just need to keep in mind that most of the anti-spam solutions are powerful to fight a large amount of automated spam and few other solutions stop manually submitted spam comments.