How To Reduce Spam By 90%.
Spamming is one of the most troubling issues faced by bloggers. If you don’t use an anti-spam plugin, your comment section is bombarded with comments mainly targeted for self promotion or for selling a product. This may not be a very big problem for blogs who are just starting out or the ones which are not so popular. But once you have reached a certain level where your blog has a decent reputation, your blog will be inundated with spam comments. If you don’t find a solution to the problem, you will end up getting irritated.
Akismet
Usually, bloggers use a plugin – Akismet (which is bundled with the wordpress installation). It is by far, the most effective anti-spam plugin. Any comment which does not pass its test is sent to the spam folder.
Although, it is good to see that all the comments which look spammy are sent to the spam folder. But, some of these comments are genuine but somehow do not pass Akismet’s test because of the following two reasons:
- The Name contains certain keywords which are usually considered spammy
- The website link or the email id have spammy names
I, for one, value my reader’s opinion and so, I make it a point to include all the genuine comments to the table. I was not happy with Akismet because it was flagging some genuine commments as spam and I had to check the spam folder manually to approve comments. This was time consuming and very frustrating.
Conditional Captcha
I came across the Conditional Captcha plugin which conditionally flagged comments as spam. Whenever Akismet flagged any comment as spam, the conditional captcha plugin will display a captcha to verify it (the commenter) was a human and not a bot. If the captcha is filled correctly, the comment can be sent to the spam folder, or in moderation queue or be approved. The ones that fail the test can be deleted permanently or sent to the trash.
By this technique, I am able to reduce the spam comments to about 10% of the comments I get.
I hope this quick tip will help you tackle the problem of spamming.
