Dealing with comment spam

Congratulations! You have written a post that for whatever reason has made its way onto the radar of comment spammers. You may not even realize that the comments are spam. I mean they are just complementing you and your post, “Great Post!! Thank you very much!” and “This web site is really a walk-through for all of the info you wanted about this and didn’t know who to ask. Glimpse here, and you’ll definitely discover it.” are two recent examples from sites hosted on Voices. These comments look innocent enough but it is the links used for the commenters URL that are the real issue. The commenter’s URL usually points to an adult site or a marketing site. So what can you do to stop such comments?

All sites on Voices already have some hidden comment spam plugins working to stop such comments, but these plugins are just checking the text of the comments for words associated with spam or excessive links in the comments. Notice that both the examples above seem like they could be legitimate and so the plugins checking for spam let them through. Dealing with comments like these involves either changing the Discussion settings under the Settings panel or enabling another plugin on your site.

If your site really only needs to get comments from classmates then you should be able to check the Users must be registered and logged in to comment box in the Other comment settings section of the Discussion settings. While you’re in the Discussion settings you might also consider checking Automatically close comments on articles older than, An administrator must always approve the comment and Comment author must have a previously approved comment boxes. This should eliminate all unwanted comments from displaying on your site. If you would like to allow comments from the general public then you should Enable the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin in the Plugins panel and check the An administrator must always approve the comment and Comment author must have a previously approved comment boxes in the Discussion settings. After doing this visit the reCAPTCHA settings under the Settings panel and configure reCAPTCHA as you would like it to operate. As always you should feel free to stop by the Instructional Technology lab in Taylor 205 if you need further assistance or have questions.

Edit: Also, see WordPress.org for some more helpful information on dealing with comment spam.