Dealing with blog comment spam

Lots of people are just getting started on Wordpress, installing their first blog on their site or getting a free blog somewhere. They’ll soon learn about blog comment spam.

Readers can comment on your blog entries. If you write interesting or controversial blog entries and you have a lot of readers, you can sometimes get some lively discussions going in the comments.

Blog comments are good. Blog comment spam is bad.

What is blog comment spam?

It is everything from links to free porn, drugs, spyware, trojans, dialers, and scams to otherwise legitmate affilate links. These are spammed to your blog in massive numbers, thanks to the fact that Wordpress blogs share a common comment entry form, which bots have been designed to recognize and spam.

Obviously, the reason they’re doing it is that people do click those links and get suckered in. It’s a dirty secret that corporate America makes big bucks when their affiliates spam anyone and everything hundreds or thousands of times.

You could easily get hundreds of spam comments a week on a popular blog.

Wordpress’s answer to this was to give you a moderation list of terms to put certain comments into a moderation queue in your admin area, and a blacklist to send comments containing certain words into oblivion. I tried this, but it was of limited usefulness, as spammers got sneakier and came up with new ways to fake out the blacklist.

So what can you do?

First of all, you have to moderate your blog comments. A blog with unmoderated comments will rapidly get buried in spam comments, and nobody will want to wade through them to try to read your blog, even if you try to remove them as soon as possible after they arrive.

Go to Options => Discussion. Select the first two options from this menu:

Make sure you resave the page.

So now your comments will form a queue in your admin area, and you will have to approve or delete them. This gets old really fast if you get a lot of spam. It’s easy to miss the real thing when you’ve got hundreds of comments to inspect and maybe only a few that are really comments.

The next thing I did was to install Akismet, a Wordpress plugin which uses a database of known spam to detect suspected spam and put it in its own moderation list. Not bad, at least at first, but you still have to moderate them. And once in a while, Akismet does catch real comments in its snare. After you reach a certain threshold, Akismet is not enough, like here:

No kidding.

I was getting really annoyed at the situation. Next I installed Bad Behavior, which observes behavior to separate out the people from the bots. I also added Spambam, yet another anti-spam plugin that does a delaying tactic before accepting comments.

I don’t have a spam problem anymore on any of my blogs. If I do have a problem, I’ll let you know how I deal with it. There are plenty more plugins out there where these came from.