Spam costs bloggers. Make no mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, whether that cost be in the time deleting comments or money spent purchasing plugins to combat it, it really is an epidemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole purpose for a spammer is to get free advertising by placing his or her message in front of a potential audience. Now note I said potential, because it is not targeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can\u2019t let this happen. We\u2019ve worked too hard to build up our own publishing space, the corresponding advertising space should be ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I\u2019m going to introduce 2 methods for combating spam, followed by a very powerful; yet little known way of battling it. And it uses a mechanism built right into WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019ve been dabbling in the WordPress space for any time now, you likely know about Akismet. It comes packaged with WordPress and is made by the same creators of WordPress \u2013 that is Automattic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The power of Akismet comes from being able to learn from the community of bloggers. My understanding is that Akismet sends your comments across the web to their servers where it checks for the presence of spam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of the server required, there is obviously an overhead on the developers\u2019 part, which is why Akismet is not free. Nonetheless, Akismet can be a good place to start, for some, and is free for personal bloggers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/akismet.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Note:<\/strong> Since writing this blog post, I now use Akismet. I tried another solution called CleanTalk. And while it was good it slowed down my site and admin area too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Captcha fields are handy ways of validating whether the person behind the submission is human. Maybe you are filling out a form and you see a box asking you to enter the code to verify you are human. Or maybe complete an equation such as one plus one equals? These are examples of captcha fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are useful tools because most spam is done through automation. And a robot is not smart enough to answer human questions. Of course, there are a variety of captcha types you could deploy. Below is an entire FREE security plugin that has the ability to add captchas to your comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\nComment Captcha Fields<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n