Comment spam in my wordpress blog
Monday, October 9th, 2006No sooner have I started my blog than I am getting attacked by spammers creating automated comments on my posts about gambling, drugs and sex aids among others!
They do not actually get onto the blog as I have it set for comments to require manual moderation first, but I do get an email about each one and have to delete them and it is getting to be a pain.
The answer is to install anti-spam software as a Wordpress plugin and the best one seems to be Akismet. This is obviously quite a big problem - here are some stats from Akismet page
238,397,660 spams caught so far
646,285 so far today (this is at 9.30 am UK time)
92% of all comments are spam
- Download the plugin and unzip to your local drive
- Upload plugin file to your WordPress
pluginsdirectory inside ofwp-content
(when I checked, it was already there) - Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
- Enter your API key.
(register for a wordpress account to get one sent to you free by email)
Once working, it should automatically mark all spam comments and trackbacks as spam and delete them after 15 days. If any get through, mark them manually and it should learn from its mistakes.
Note that once you have got a wordpress API key you can use it to activate Akismet on all your blogs - click on the link in your profile that tells you Akismet has not been activated then paste in your API key.