This quick tip shows you how to prevent some of the spam coming from the comments form on blog posts of your WordPress website.
Comment spam is pretty incredibly annoying! Even if you moderate each comment that is left on your posts you are still left with the task of sifting through masses of SPAM comments (versus the few legit ones) and deleting them. Most comments left on old blog posts are going to be spam anyway. And there there’s not much value to you in legitimate visitors leaving comments on very old blog posts anyway – ultimately you want people interacting with the post within a week or two of you publishing it.
Yes you can install Captcha or Akismet but this is a great way to prevent comment spam on your older posts. And it’s easy – you don’t have to install any plugins.
Watch the Video
or follow these instructions…
What to Do
What I suggest is that you switch off the commenting facility on blog posts over a certain number of days. If you switch it off after say 30 days then if a blog post has been published more than 30 days ago there will be a “comments closed” message instead of the form. If you have a lot of old blog posts then this simple action will prevent lots of spammers getting through by the simple fact there is no comments form available on the older posts.
Some people might suggest that people should register and login to leave a comment but I don’t agree – that’s no way to encourage your legit visitors to leave a comment. And often spammers have no problem creating an account just to leave a spam comment.
- So login to your WordPress website.
- Go to Settings > Discussion.
- Check the “Automatically close comments on articles older than [Enter number of days] days”. I’d suggest somewhere between 30 and 60 days.
Prevent spam by switching off comments after 30 days.
That’s it. I hope it helps you combat the endless WordPress comments SPAM that we have to deal with!
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