If you are looking to stop spam comments on your blog, here are 5 tips which you can follow -

1. Use Akismet – this has to be to your first step in stopping spam comments. Akismet plugin can stop 95% of automated spam comments on your blog. You will be needing wordpress API key to use it which you can get by registering at wordpress.com

2. Install other wordpress plugins too which are created to stop spam – I have covered such plugins in the past and you can install is_human or wp hashcash plugins too along with akismet to stop wordpress spam comments.

3. Use Captcha to stop spam – You can install simple captcha wordpress plugin to stop bots making automated comments. I think using captcha is a must on big blogs as they are more prone to spam bot attacks.

4. Rename your comments file – lot of bots simple look for comments.php file and start filling it randomly changing their ip’s, so you can rename your comments.php file in your theme to comething else. The change in name won’t make any difference in the way the site works.

5. Keep moderation high – I do not allow any comment which has a link in it to get auto approved. You can also keep similar comment approval policy by going to Settings –> Discussion

6. Disable comments on older Posts – Personally I am not a great fan of this and won’t do it on my blog but if you want you can disable comments on older posts The newer version of wordpress 2.7.x has this functionality built in, for the older wordpress version you will have to install plugins.

So that is it, these tips and methods should help cut down on the bot spam on your wordpress blog.

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