The biggest pet peeve of any website owner is the inevitable spam that will pile up. Ranging from comments begging for SEO attention, to those promoting every product on the far side of the Earth, spam is a clear nuisance to the minds of any webmaster.

Allowing spam comments to live on your posts may make it look like you’re getting more comments, but they just hurt you in the end – the remove the value and respect of your community (or the community you’re trying to build).

Spending time sifting through spam is a tedious task that is of the same enjoyment of tearing your own hair out. Luckily for WordPress users, though, the task is simplified with a few plugins!

How to Eliminate Spam Comments

There are hundreds of plugins and similar solutions to eliminate spam on your WordPress blog. There are two very common solutions that every blog – even this one – implement to destroy the headache:

• Akismet

Akismet is a tool that sifts through new comments on your blog to find spam. Using the latest algorithms to detect trends in spam comments, it can easily send them to your spam folder, thus allowing you to, as the website says, “focus on more important things”.

If you use WordPress, Akismet is a must. It’s free, and will save you a boat-load of time.

• A Captcha Code

Anti-Bot Check-boxes

One of the growing trends I’ve noticed among blogs to deter spam are checkboxes that read “Please check to confirm you’re not a spammer”. They’re effective, but very inefficient.

They may complete the task, but they give the user yet another task to complete. Although it is quiet simple to check the check-box, it is easily missed, leaving perfectly good comments to be marked as spam.

It’s like going to the same store every day and, every time, being asked if you’d like to buy a discount card. It happens every time. It gets quiet annoying.

Humans are designed to value simplicity – we don’t like to see fifteen different options in the form of check-boxes. If you feel that it is the best method, though, please feel free to use it – MP Spam Be Gone.

Conditional Captcha

The problem with Akismet is that it will, without doubt, occasionally mark a legitimate comment as spam. If you’re anything like me, you don’t spend a lot of time knit-picking your spam que – you just delete it. Like that, a valuable comment is erased from existence.

That’s when a genius mind was set to work – Conditional Captcha was born. Whenever a comment is flagged by Akismet, it gives the users a simple captcha code (that can be adjusted in your settings). Should they get it correct, it will be moved out of spam.

The idea to only show flagged users a Captcha code is extremely effective and efficient. Real commentators are no longer hassled with the check-boxes or Captcha codes that robots are. Please do consider Conditional Captcha.

How Do You Prevent Spam?

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