Blogging tips, tricks and tools – make money blogging

Apart from finding content to update your blog, the next most frustrating aspect of blog ownership is all those spammy comments that you inevitably receive. You know the crap I’m talking about, the pharmacy sites, viagra, pornography etc. It wouldn’t be so bad if that were what your site were about. But these annoying individuals like to inundate blogs with massive long comments with 50-100 links each etc. It’s so disheartening to log in to your dashboard and discover 50, 70 or even 100 of these crappy comments that have absolutely nothing to do with your content.

This kind of behavior has made it necessary for blog owners to either turn off comments altogether or to moderate every single comment that is received (which is what I do with my blogs). Another annoying aspect of this blog spam is that perpetrators frequently leave one or more comments on every single post that is available for commenting.

To combat this type of abuse I recommend what I believe to be one of the best wordpress plugins around called ‘WP-Ban’. This plugin allows you to ban visitors according to

• IP Address
• IP Range
• Host name
• Referrer (website)
• User Agent

You can even exclude individual users from being banned despite banning every other user from their host or country.

But how do you know who to ban. Well, when you go to your comment page within your dashboard you will see that below each comment author is listed their IP address. If there are multiple spam comments coming from the same IP address you simply add that IP address to the banned IP’s in the WP-Ban settings (found under ‘Settings’>'Ban’.

If you find you have several IPs that are similar, for example 92.241.169.135 and 92.241.169.142 then you can either ban those individually or you can ban the everyone from that host by using the wildcard symbol like this 92.241.169.* or you can do it with a range like this ‘92.241.169.135-92.241.169.142′

A word of caution here… do NOT ban your own IP in order to test or you will not be able to get back into your dashboard and you will have to ask your host to log in to your blog and remove the ban from your IP.

Once you have added an IP to the ban list, whenever someone using that IP tries to access your page they will be redirected to another page that you can edit from within the plugin settings. I had a little fun with mine and embedded a wav file saying ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that!’ with big red text saying ‘ALL COMMENT SPAMMERS BANNED’. You can find the wav file here

The plugin even supplies statistics of how many times a banned IP has attempted to access the blog. If you find that certain IPs don’t attempt to re-offend then you may remove the ban from that IP simply by removing it from the list. You can always re ban them if they start spamming again.

This excellent plugin is available from http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

Another one of the best wordpress plugins that help stop comment spam is a plugin called ‘Botproof Captcha’. Botproof captcha is a unique captcha plugin that uses dynamic animated images containing a turing number (If you’re on the individual post page right now you will see this plugin in action below). This image is designed to confuse software programs that post automated comments and it works admirably. When I installed this plugin I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments daily to around 2 spam comments per day. I believe this testifies to the effectiveness of the plugin making it one of the best plugins available. This free plugin is available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/botproof-captcha-20/

It should be noted that to use Botproof Captcha you will need to sign up for a free account at botproof.com

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins!

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