I love WordPress blogs because they are so simple to use.

You just login, write a short message, click ‘Publish’ and it is up on the web.

An added bonus is that people can add comments to your posts to discuss what you have written.

Of course, as with anything good on the web, spammers and scumbags have to try and take advantage of it.

WordPress blogs, unfortunately, attract idiot comment spammers. These people run automated programs which visit your blog and leave comments about all kinds of unwanted subjects – porn, drugs, get rich quick schemes etc.

If you don’t moderate comments, your blog could pretty quickly get filled up with crap.

After almost a year of running this particular blog, I think I have pretty much stopped the spammers now. I get the occassional junk comment but now it is just one, rather than the 50 or so I was getting daily.

What I did was ensure that every comment had to be moderated before it could appear on the blog, EXCEPT for comments by people who had been approved before.

So, if you’ve written a comment on here which has been approved in the past and you write a new one, it should appear immediately – no moderation required.

As I was deleting all of the spam, I kept track of all the stupid words that the spammers were using.

Every time I got a new comment about a certain drug I would add that drug’s name to the Blacklist.

This means that any comments written that mention “cialis” for example, are deleted immediately so I don’t even see them.

Soon I also noticed that the spammers were using similar domain names everytime so I would add part of the domain name into the Blacklist.

Almost all spammers on this blog were using dot info domain names.

I was tempted to add “.info” to the Blacklist but I decided not to just in case someone genuine was using this kind of web address.

So far there are about 250 terms that trigger deletion of comments on this particular blog and they seem to be keeping it clear of any crap.

And good thing too.

I’ve seen blogs that are left to rot and it isn’t pretty once the comment spammers take hold so if you value your own blog, please make sure to keep your Blacklist up to date!

Thanks for reading,

Ben

P.S. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out The How To Lay Off Your Boss Home Study Course – surprisingly good!

P.P.S. By all means leave a comment on this post but please don’t use any dodgy words…