Spam and the Akismet!

If you have an email address and receive emails I’m sure you are all too familiar with Spam. I don’t have to deal with too much spam in my own email because I use gMail as my email provider and have done so for years. Spam on all levels in it’s most simplest terms can be see as those annoying people how try to crash a party or show up somewhere uninvited. This becomes very noticable when you launch a site using an Open Source framework like the self hosted version of WordPress, or another blogging platform for that matter.

When completed your installation of WordPress it’s quite possible that you didn’t think those nasty spammers that email would also find your blog and start bombarding you with spam there as well. There are several ways in which one can block or filter this kind of trash from the original content and maintain its integrity. Blogs when open for all to see on the web are also an open invitation to spam comments.

The basic thing you need to do as a WordPress blog owner is to restrict comments only to registered users.Most of the time, spammers uses automated bots to post thousands of comments on your old posts and create quite a mess of the whole thing. You can use the option of limiting comments to a default number of days and have the rest of them turned off the blog. Say for example if you set the default number of days to 14 , it will turn off the comments on posts that are older than 14 days, which means no more spam comments posted by automated bots and no pingback spam either. You can find this option in your WordPress Dashboard under the Setting section. Go to “Discussion” and look for the option to the number of days to your choice.

The simplest way to prevent spam from flooding your blog is by installing an anti-spam plugin. There are a number of plugins available that are compatible with WordPress blogs. Most of them are available for free and work just fine. But it is important to choose just the right kind; one that serves the purpose and is going to add some value to your blog.

Even if you have already installed an anti-spam plugin, you can still go in for an additional layer of spam control by using comment captcha codes. With comment captchas visitors have to enter a series of alphabets or numericals for posting a comment. This can help eliminate spam posted via automated bots since those captchas can only be entered by humans. Many of the comment plugins come with a captcha options and if it’s something that is important for, I would recommend searching for a comment plugin that includes this option.

Akismet is one of the most popular spam filtering plugin which is available for WordPress blogs. This is available on installation of all new blogs and it just needs to be enabled. This plugin is an effective spam watchdog, this video shares how you can sign up to get your Akismet API key, it is also one of the videos that is part of my WordPress Video Mastery Series.