Kathy McGraw asked me in the comment section of my last blog how I would prevent comment spamming in a Wordpress blog.

I had to think about it but before long I came up with several ways and some FREE Plugins for to Prevent spam.

Simple Fix first. Disable Pingback or Trackback.

To disable pingback on your wordpress posts go into the dashboard. Select Options then select the discussions tab. Uncheck allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) This will disable trackbacks on future posts.

To completely disable trackbacks on all your posts, you will have to edit each old post and uncheck allow pings, in the write post discussion menu, located along the right hand side of the page.

The other approach is to black list certain words from the spam posts. Be careful, because if a comment word matches a blacklisted word, the comment will be destroyed without notification. Comments that are spam are held in your database to educate anti-spam plugins.

FREE Plugins

Akismet is installed by default on all Wordpress blogs. It checks comments you receive against the Akismet service to see if the comments look like spam. Be sure to activate this plugin. If you need to install it now download it and FTP it to your plugin folder (located under content folder of your wordpress site on your host server). You will need an API key to make this work if you are installing it now.

WP-BAN Will ban IP addresses from visiting your blog. It will generate a custom ban message when the banned IP or host tries to visit your blog. This works to prevent manual spammers.

WP-Spam free. Is a free plugin for wordpress that claims to almost totally eliminate comment spam from bots even trackback and pingback spam. This includes a spam free form feature as well.

WP-reCaptcha is the most advanced method of spam protection it is based on Captucha (random generation of characters). If you are on  Facebook, Twitter and other Social Networking sites you will be recognize this. Here is an example

It also has a mail hide feature to disguise you email address. But making that work is not for the faint of heart since you have to download and install a couple of additional files.  A far easier way to hide your email is to use one of the Internet sites that turn your email address into either Java Script code or that generates a bunch of numbers and symbols in place of text and the @ sign in you address (obfuscates the address).  You put your address in the code generator and click the generate button and it generates your code. Humans can see you text it but bots look for that @ sign and can't find it and move on.

If want to go the encryption route here is an encryption tool. Once again here is my email address encrypted. The encrypted e-mail address of Caryn Webb can be decrypted by opening the URL

http://address-protector.com/RMH25TM-AtbX7lLKAio02yZ2FrfeoxmZSwEar3RNPMAeNd2Hp1rk7nG0whguY07g

Here is a Wordpress article about how to prevent spam

Steps to Install Wordpress Pulgins.

1. Download plugin and unzip.

2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.

3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.

I hope these steps and tools will keep your blog spam free!