I’ve been hearing a lot of people complaining about how much SPAM they are getting & WordPress being unable to stop them. Well I do sympathise for these people for being victimised by SPAMMERS but they are wrong in blaming WordPress. 🙄 As far as I’ve seen, WordPress has one of the strongest SPAM prevention features out-of-box. 😉 These features are made more powerful by some excellent work by the contributors to WordPress by rolling out great plugins that go a long way in blocking SPAM. 😀
So here’s a small list which will help you in combating SPAM if you are a WordPress user.
Kitten’s Friendly Comments:-
Allows comments by e-mail addresses whose comments you’ve approved in past. The rest of the comments end up in moderation que. The development of this plugin as stand-alone has been discontinued as its now part of the WordPress 1.3 core but you can still get its v1.0 from that link for use in WP1.2 & WP1.2.1
Spammer Tar Pit:-
This plugin by Dougal, a WP Dev, is an excellent one for combating spam. Check it out.
WP Blacklist:-
This one works. Do check it out.
Shut Off Comments on Old Posts:-
If you want, shut off comments on posts after they cross a certain age limit & become adolescents.
CSPAM:-
Read it here, I myself don’t understand it.
3 Strikes:-
Much much better SPAM blocking, the concept is very good. 😀
Kitten’s SPAM Words:-
This plugin adds a “Delete Comments as SPAM” button to mass moderation page of comments. When you delete a comment as SPAM, its eMail, URL, IP & links in comment body are all added to the SPAM Words List. So future comments matching that will be in moderation que.
Kitten’s Comment Pay:-
This is one of Kitty’s Good ideas. It matches the comment content against a list & if any matches are found, it presents a page which asks the commenter to pay for making a comment as his comment contain possible advertising. 😉
Comment Killer Plugin:-
This is the extreme stuff, branded as “weapons grade plutonium” by Kitty. Be cautious while using this. If a comment is flagged for moderation, this plugin will delete it if its active. BEWARE. 😀
Kitten’s Spaminator:-
Hot new plugin from Kitty, this is a combo of the Spammer Tar Pit & 3 Strikes plugins mentioned above. A must check out, this plugin improves on Marks original 3 Strikes.
Besides, you can also use Simon’s Blacklist which is quite extensive & is frequently updated.
Also, if you find that a SPAMMER is using same IPs to SPAM you, you can block those IPs through .htaccess file by putting in the code
[ini gutter=”no”]
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
[/ini]
Here, the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP of the SPAMMER.
But remember, you can use .htaccess file only if you are running Apache Webserver & if your host allows the use of .htaccess files. 🙂
These should be of help to those WP users who don’t already have any of these weapons. You will find that you can give SPAMMERS a real hard time with these weapons in your arsenal. 😀 😉