Free ways to stop WordPress spam
October 19, 2010 How do/did, How To
I have been wasting a lot of time deleting spam, and I don’t know why I didn’t think to look for a way to deal with it until a site I host asked for help. I found ways to deal with spam and spammers that are not only free, they are surprisingly easy.
The first is Akismet, a plugin that usually automatically comes with WordPress. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service, which will determine if it is spam or not. The Akismet web service is constantly being trained by everyone telling it about spam it has missed or non-spam that it gave a false positive, so it works extremely well.
All you have to do is activate Akismet (it’s probably already in your plugins, and if not, you can download it here) and then get an API key, which is free if you’re making under $500 a year (if you make more than that, it’s just $5 a month). You can use the same API key for multiple blogs, so you’ll only need one.
So now that you’ve blocked spammers from commenting, it’s time to block them from your site completely so that they aren’t using extra sever power. The Block Top Spammers plugin generates a list of the IPs from things Askimet (and you) marks as spam. Then all you have to do is edit your .htaccess and add “deny from [spam ip]” (so if the spammer’s ip is 192.168.1.1 you would put: deny from 192.168.1.1), and voala, those spammers are gone.
These two simple plugins will save you time, bandwidth, and server load. I feel stupid for never using them before!
