It can be really annoying when you wake up in the morning to only be disgruntled by the sight of several spam comments which you then have to take the time to delete. Not only are they an eye sore on your website they are generally full of outgoing links to rubbish websites which you don’t want to be related to.
Now it would be great if you could stop these comments from appearing on your web page or even better stop the comments ever existing in the first place. These 5 steps are going to help to make your time count, instead of spending those several minutes or countless hours deleting comments go out for a walk or write some articles.
Captcha acronyms
We have all come across these one place or another usually when signing up to a forum or submitting a website in a directory or search engine. Captcha’s are basically acronyms, a mix of numbers and letters which websites use to stop automated visitors or bots. In this case captchas can be put in place to stop automated visitors from spamming your website with useless irrelevant comments.
The benefits of using Captchas are that they work. By using these you would more or less stop any spamming on your website however the downside is that it may also stop real visitors from commenting too. This therefore could work both ways, I would advise anyone who is contemplating using a captcha to sum up the costs and benefits of using such a technique. Whilst they may save you ten or twenty minutes in the morning they may also decrease the amount of commenting you do receive therefore putting added pressure on your growing community.
Making commenter’s log in
Another strategy which works well is enforcing that anyone who wants to comment on your article log in to the website first. This is something that they use on SEOmoz and it seems to work great there.
The drawbacks of such scheme are again that many visitors may be put of by having to register and then log in to make a simple comment where they may just praise you for your article or ask a simple question. This in turn can effect the growth of your community.
Akismet
This was first created for wordpress however it is now compatible with many other types of blog/website. Akismet basically identifies which comments it feels are spam comments and disapproves them. This does not delete them from your admin panel however ensures that they are not viewable from the web page, you then need to go through the comments and delete these manually.
The benefits of Akismet are that it’s easy to install and free as well as it doesn’t affect the community that surrounds your blog or the growth of your community.
Blacklist repeat spammers
A way in which you can control the amount of spam you receive is by blacklist certain IP addresses of people who have already spammed your blog before. This process however involves editing the htaccess file which can become rather annoying. Another downfall of this strategy is that it does not stop the spamming problem as it merely controls the problem.
Disallow blog comments on older posts
Most blog spammers focus on spamming older posts more than new posts this is mainly because older posts won’t be checked for spam comments as much as newer posts. If you disallow this function then this will surely decrease the amount of spam you receive but again this will not put an end to spam.
In conclusion the best I feel is Akismet although this does not disable spammers from commenting spamming it does ensure that they are not viewable from the web page. This therefore makes it worthless for spammers to actually spam your website, however they still do this. So perhaps a mixture of both Askimet and blacklisting repeat spammers is the trick.
What do you use to prevent spamming on your blog?
