How To Stop Wordpress Comment Spam
By Trevor John

By default, Wordpress blogs allow comments. After all, that’s the idea of blogging. You want to put up your opinions and invite other people to add in their 2 cents.

The trouble is that since Wordpress is so popular, it’s a good target for spammers. If they can get their comment into your blog, they get another free link to their web site. The more they do this, the more traffic they get. There are tools on the market that allow people to spam blog comments. And if those aren’t good enough, it’s cheap and easy to hire a programmer at one of the many freelance sites.

So spam comments aren’t going to go away.

Using the default Wordpress setup, there is an option to use Akismet to catch your spam. There is one hoop to jump through before you can do this, you need to get a Wordpress API key (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, they tell you what to do to get one) and then Akismet is all set to go.

Akismet works well. At the last count, it told me it had trapped 645 spam comments. And mine isn’t a high traffic blog.

The trouble is, Akismet will only identify the spam comments. It won’t stop them being posted. So you still need to go through and check that it hasn’t flagged a legitimate comment as spam before deleting them.

I got fed up with this checking, so I looked around for another solution.

Whilst I’m not a big fan of “captcha” devices- the ones where you have to type in a word that’s displayed in an odd font – I can now say that they do a great job of reducing spam comments. Check out my resource box below for the best one I’ve found (and it’s free!).

Click the link for the best captcha Wordpress plugin that I’ve found. If you’re not a comment spammer but want to easily find other possibly relevant blogs to post to then Comment Hut is a great time saver.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Trevor_John http://EzineArticles.com/?How-To-Stop-Wordpress-Comment-Spam&id=549153

Spammers find WordPress to be one of its prime targets. Spammers love to get on our websites and start posting away their spam messages. If you have a blog, you have more than likely already been spammed. Most Spammers have software that does all their dirty work for them. It can be very frustrating to endure an attack of spamming trolls.

There is no need use up all your precious time trying to delete all the negative comments from your WordPress blog one by one. Instead, I offer you the directions for deleting them all at once. 

Yes, it is irritating to have to take care of; however, this can save you a great deal of time, especially if you have received many spam messages.

Yet before you can delete them, you will have to set those particular comments up, so that you approve them, before they even appear on your website. To do this, follow these simple steps.

1. Login. 

2. Click on Options at the top of your WordPress window.

3. Under Options, Click on Discussion.

4.  Find on that page – Before a comment appears: 

5. Check, An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below).

6. Click Update Options. 

You have just setup your comments option so that no one can send a message through, without it being moderated for spam.

To delete the comments follow these steps.

1. Login. 

2. Click on Manage.

3. Click on Awaiting Moderation.

4. To delete all, scroll to the bottom and click Mark all for Deletion. 

5. Click Moderate Comments.

This will delete them all.

If there are any you do not want deleted uncheck them before clicking Moderate Comments. As you can go through and keep certain comments by clicking the button of your choice. Each comment offers the options of Approve, Defer until later as well as Delete and Spam.

The choice is yours, which comments you would like to keep, and which comments you want to delete. I do hope that this tutorial is helpful to you.