4 Steps To Kill Spammers Without Plugins

Posted by: Tran Tinh on November 13 in My Style

There are many ways to protect your wordpress-powered blogs from spammer/spambots. The most popular method that many bloggers are now applying is to use plugins. However, they are not aware of that installing more plugins will increase their blog loading time and that also means they will loose their inpatient readers. Further, some hosting providers now limit to CPU resource then you should be careful while installing so many plugins on your blog.

I have experienced with many anti-spam plugins on SEO – MMO Tips; some worked very well and the remaining were too bad. However, most of them has made many mistakes in filtering comments. They sometimes blocked or filtered my legitimate comments as spams. I relied on those tools too much and the result was that I lost many legitimate comments.

That is why I decided to switch back to default spam-protection within WordPress admin. This feature is really useful and if you pay more attention to it, you will find it an incredible tool to prevent against spammers/spambots.

All of these steps are focused on Discussion section in your WordPress Admin Settings:

Step 1: Set up your spam filtering machanism

Normally, WordPress default spam filtering mechanism is to filter all comments that have more than 2 hyperlinks in the body to moderation queue and you need to login to approve or deny  them. However, many smart spam softare now can pass that setting, they just put only one hyperlink then spam comments are still appeared on your blog. So, the solution that I apply here is to reduce number of hyperlink to 1 only.

Step 2: Comment author must have a previously approved comment

This feature is very important as it can reduce your workload and all commentators need to have at least one previously approved comment so their next comments will not be moderated. You have to carefully review the first comment of any commentators as if you turn this feature on and you make mistake for the first comment review then the spammers’ comment will be got through your firewall in the future.

Step 3: Blacklist or even Ban IP of suspected commentators

If you have done two steps above successfully, I can guarantee that over 95% of your blog are secure and clean. However, to make sure that your blog are 99 % clean and fresh, you should also take sometime to go through any suspected commentators, copy their IP, domain, email and bad words in their comment and paste them into the Comment Blacklist and Comment moderation box.

Step 4: Ensure 100% secure and clean by moderating every comments.

Frankly, I do not want to do this and you don’t either. However, for some reasons, spambot can still pass our firewall and spam comments are still delivered to our blog. If this happens regularly at high frequency, you should turn on the feature: An administrator must always approve the comment and I am sure that your blog is now 100% secure and clean!

I have applied these tips and my blog now is both fast in terms of loading time and clean interms of spam comments. You will never see spam comments on my blog at all. If you are tired of using too many plugins and your blog loading is too slow, let’s try these steps and you will enjoy it.

Your comments and questions are very much appreciated!