Blocking spam comments

[mattsgame]

Hey all,

Hope someone can help me out here, I am pretty new to using Wordpress for my sites. I decided to open up comments on trycasinogamesfree so that players could comment on the casino game reviews and casino reviews.

I also opened them up on my warning section for other webmasters to post their concerns about the warnings I had up on my site along with a link to their own warning.

The site is far from completely finished and I am constantly writing content for it (have around 60 articles to go up) but my time is being taken up by stupid spamming comments. Most of these are form PayDay loan places. I do have to approve them first of course so they are not live but every time I login to the backend of Wordpress I find myself going through and marking 40 - 80 comments as spam.

I have tried a couple of plugins but the problem with those is that genuine peoples comments with a link (say a webmaster with a link to there warning) is being blocked as well.

Is there a good plugin or some other way to block them? or do I just have to put up with it as its the nature of the beast.

Thank you everyone appreciate your time.

Cheers
Matt

 

[Vladi]

Blocking spammers is a never ending arms race. You have automated spam bots and also paid human spammers to deal with.

For the spambots, the best thing I can suggest is to modify your comment or registration forms such that they are not standard wordpress or whatever other CMS you are using. For example, a simple one is to put in a text box with a message that says do not enter anything in this field, then hide it with CSS. Humans won't see it but spambots will and they almost always fill in every field when they submit a form. As soon as you detect someone submitting a comment or registration with that form field filled in, you know to block them.

That will stop most automated spammers, but it won't stop the human spammers that are employed by two bit "SEO" companies in 3rd world countries, nor will it stop a specialised targeted attack against your site where they take the time to analyse your comment or registration fields and work out what is needed to bypass the block. I wouldn't worry about that last one unless your site becomes very big and well ranked and an attractive target to link spammers.

For the human spammers you can check out stopforumspam.com or akismet, or any of the other crowd-sourced spam blocking solutions. These can block spammers based on their IP address, email address, username or content of their post.

As I say, its a never ending battle as the spammers will continually come up with new ways to get around the blocks. That is why doing something totally custom for your site is essential as it removes you as one of the low hanging fruit targets.