Tom Raftery’s Social Media

I have recently been plagued with Blog Comment spam on this Wordpress powered Blog. The Comment spam takes the form of comments on posts containing links to poker/pharmaceutical/whatever sites - the point being that if the comments are published, the sites will gain another external link and rise in search engine rankings.

I moderate all comments on this blog so nothing gets published without my approval. Hence, the spam comments are never published, but I have to wade through them to find genuine comments and then delete the spam - this process is, at best, tedious and at worst, a pain in the … neck.

I searched for ways around this and found a nice Wordpress plug-in called WPBlacklist. This plug-in has a very comprehensive configuration and, at first, worked very well. However, more recently, it was causing errors on the site whenever someone tried to make a legitimate comment.

I was alerted to this by Michele and he pointed me towards another plug-in for helping with blog comment which he finds useful. This one works on the basis of checking for links in the blog to Spam identified sites - it sounded promising, so I tried it. Again I was disappointed because I was still receiving many emails notifying me of comments (most of which were spam) and then I had to delete these comments.

Finally, I came across a post by Fahim Farook - the developer of the WPBlacklist plug-in that I had the trouble with previously. In his post, though, he recommends re-naming the Wordpress comments file - and references to it.

This sounds like a beautifully simple way to overcome this problem. It should stop most automated comment scripts. I am trying this solution now - I renamed the file and the reference I found to it in the index file. I’ve also re-named some of the variables in the comments file (specifically the $comment_author_url and $comments variables). I haven’t tested it extensively yet, but so far, so good - and no comment spam has come in since I did this! Here’s hoping!