Spam has been a real problem for many bloggers, unfortunately, it’s also a multiple vector problem as it arrives in a number of ways for bloggers.
1. via email – if you put your email address in the blog or the posting or in the sidebar, your email address will be found and harvested quite quickly!
2. via comments – comment spam is the posting of irrelevant or unwanted comments in your post’s feedback section. Seemingly this is becoming automated.
3. via trackbacks – often spam blogs will post trackback links to your blog, in the same manner as #2. Trackback spam can hit some blogs severely.
To combat these kinds of spam, a number of measures can be adopted to reduce the inconvenience to a minimum.
1. Install a mailform plugin that forwards mail from your readers to your email address. Additionally, create several email aliases that you can dispose of, should you need to. You don’t need to worry about changing or deleting an alias as when people contact you, you will likely mail via your regular mailing address. Aliases should redirect mail to a real mailbox.
A good plugin is: PXSMail which I use on my blog here. I use my main host to create additional mailing addresses without mailboxes. I can have unlimited addresses all ending at `@investorblogger.com. Additionally, I use Gmail as my preferred mailbox because of the sophistication of their spam filters. They’re pretty good!
2. Managing your settings in Wordpress. You can do this in a number of ways.
In your Options Settings in the Administration, you can set these if you wish. This should help stop some spam by checking these options. If people are registering to post spam, then you may wish to uncheck the first option.
Then in the Discussion Options Settings, you can also set the Email Options which will keep you uptodate. In addition, there are three options that can help limit spam for your blog.
These three options at the bottom will help limit spam, by giving control to the administrator, and by setting some parameters.
3. However, for any but the most recent blogs, these tools are insufficient for handling spam. So enters Spam Karma 2.
Once installed, I set mine to the ‘nice’ severity level. I found that the out of the box settings were quite sufficient, though it has hooked one or two genuine comments, and allowed through one or two fake comments, I’ve found that quite sufficient. From the jpegs in this posting, you’ll see my own settings for this blog at the moment.
With these options and plugins installed, I get very little spam at the moment. Without them installed, this jpeg highlights the likely spam that I would have otherwise have had:
See the 1193 comments awaiting moderation! I gotta install Spam Karma 2 on this other blog of mine!
How bad is your spam problem? Have you managed to bring it under control?
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