Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part II

Part II: When Comments Go Wrong

In the first part of this series, I explained what comments and pingbacks are and how they can benefit your blog. If you don’t know this stuff, go back and read that first. In this part of the series, I’ll explain how and why the comments feature can go wrong and list three tools for WordPress that can fight it.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

While your blog’s readers like the comments feature because it enables them to participate in your blog, spammers like it, too. It gives them the ability to share their spammy comments and links on your blog.

Comment spam is a terrible problem for bloggers. If left uncontrolled, it can quickly take over your blog by filling post comments with a lot of garbage — some of of obscene — including links to Web sites you probably don’t want to advertise for. Your blog visitors will have to wade through all this junk to find real comments. If the problem is bad enough, the probably won’t bother looking. If the comment spam is offensive enough, they might not visit your blog again.

Comment spam’s close cousin is pingback spam, which is relatively new to blogging. In pingback spam, someone else’s blog links back to yours, placing a pingback link to that blog in your blog. The purpose may be to get your site visitors to come to that blog, or, if you have nofollow disabled, to improve the site’s Google page rank.

Both comment spam and pingback spam can be automatically generated. For comment spam, spambot programs can automatically find comment forms on a blog, fill in the fields, and submit the spam comments. Pingback spam can be created through the use of feed “scraping” tools that pull parts of posts from your blog and posts them to the spammer’s blog, along with a link to yours. Because of automation, so there’s no limit to how much spam can be sent to your blog.

Spam Stopping Tools

Fortunately, there’s help. Many WordPress programmers are out there, fighting the same war against spam that you are. They have the skills to write plugins that can identify spam and quarantine or delete it so it doesn’t appear on your blog.

While there are numerous spam prevention tools out there for WordPress users, I have personal experience with three of them:

• Aksimet, which is part of WordPress.com and comes as a plugin with self-hosted WordPress blogs, is created and maintained by the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress. It’s fully integrated into WordPress and is extremely effective. I tell you more about how to set up and use Akismet in Part IV of this series.

Spam Karma, by Dr. Dave, is another powerful spam prevention tool. I used this exclusively for a while and it caught all the spam that appeared on my site. The only reason I stopped using it is because I switched to Akismet.

• Bad Behavior is a plugin by Michael Hampton. It attempts to head off spam by determining whether a hit to a blog post is by a human or a spambot. Spambots are automatically denied access. One side benefit of this approach is a reduction in MySQL activity due to spambot access — that’s why I initially began using it. I used Bad Behavior in conjunction with one of the other spam prevention tools listed here for some time before trusting Akismet to do the whole job. The reason: Bad Behavior sometimes records false positives, making it impossible for certain real people to post comments. This problem occurs rarely, but since Akismet seems to be doing the job on its own, I prefer not to take the chance. (Note to Michael if you stop by to read this: if I got this wrong, please do comment to set me straight.)

I should note here that both Akismet and Spam Karma can “learn” about spam based on how you resolve comments you manually moderate. That’s why it’s important to properly identify any false positives or missed spam.

In the next post of this series, I’ll explain how you can identify comment spam — even when it doesn’t look like spam.

Learn More

Learn more about working with a self-hosted WordPress installation — or WordPress.com. Check out my WordPress courses on Lynda.com.