MilkAddict

How to avoid SPAM attacks to your blog? How to improve the performance of your blog?

A common problem for bloggers is the time wasted checking and deleting SPAM comments that they get to their blogs, time that could be turned into content creation! this could be possible using an automated spam killer plugin that could do the job of controlling and marking new spam comments as SPAM.

AKISMET PLUGIN

One first simple solution for the SPAM problem is to use the Akismet plugin for WordPress!

The latest version of the plugin at the moment is the 2.0, and it works for WordPress 2.0 or above.

INSTALLATION

1. Download from Akismet website and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload the file to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Login to your WordPress admin, click “Plugins”, and then activate the “Akismet” plugin.
4. After the activation you have to enter your WordPress API Key. The API Key it’s like a password for your account and allows you to use services built on the WordPress engine. You get the API Key by email when you sign up for a WordPress account, or you can find it listed on your Profile page, which you can get to by clicking the “My Account” or “My Profile” link in the top right when you’re logged in your WordPress blog.
5. You’re done!

HOW AKISMET WORKS

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and decides if it has to be marked as SPAM.

When the plugin marks something as spam it saves it in your database for 15 days and then automattically deletes it. This way you can check out manually the comments in case something has been incorrectly identified as spam.

SIMPLE SPAM FILTER

There may still be a problem! Let’s suppose that Akismet marked 400 comments as SPAM while you were away. Because of the high volume of spam, it may become almost impossible to check the accuracy of Akismet manually and see if some comment was incorrectly labelled as spam.

A solution is to add to the Akismet plugin a very SIMPLE SPAM PRE-FILTER plugin to cut down on the number of those really obvious spam comments.

INSTALLATION

1. Download the SIMPLE SPAM PRE-FILTER and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload the entire “tantan” directory to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Login to your WordPress admin, click “Plugins”, and then activate the “TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter” plugin.
4. You’re done!
5. Bonus: Enable the”TanTanNoodles Version Checker” plugin to automatically get notified of when updates to this plugin are available.

HOW THE FILTER WORKS

If the SIMPLE SPAM PRE-FILTER plugin recognize a comment as possible SPAM, it will immediately reject the comment, throwing an error with an explaination of why the comment was rejected. If it’s a real person trying to comment (they’ll have to try really hard to get their comment rejected!), they can use the error message to go back to edit their comment.

A comment will be rejected if it matches any of the following patterns:

• Contains 5 or more links to external websites.
• Contains [url=http://www.example.com]example[/url] style links.
• Contains a word that matches a short list of common spam words (for example viagra or cialis). Have a look at the plugin’s source code for the full list.

Thanks a lot to these guys to make our work here easier!!