Comments are the best section in our WordPress blog to find out how popular our blog is among public. If you have healthy comments for your topics it means that you have good amount of blog readers who read your articles regularly. Comments also indicate that your blog is having a wider reach. But story does not end here and is not as sweeter as it sounds. Comments even though have those above said advantages it also has got a big disadvantage –Spams or irrelevant comments. From my experience I have found that spam comments are more common and often. Well in WordPress you have options to delete unwanted comments in mass. But the problem here is that you may have chances to delete legitimate ones also when you do so. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/ Akismet is great plugin tool which can categorize comments accordingly. It can detect unwanted/spam comments and is one of the most used and favorite spam filter plugin among WordPress users. But again problem here with Akismet is that it can show good comments in spam list. It sometimes shows false positive on legitimate comments. So it becomes our priority to check the comments one by one.
But there is another easy way to avoid this. We can add captcha code verification to our comments field so that only legitimate readers can post the comment rather unwanted bots doing the work. Uses of such a service will decrease the amount of spam remarkably. Such a great plugin is SI CAPTCHA Anti-spam which can do the same purpose. It will add a captcha code on the comments section, so that readers who want to submit the comment must enter correct code and then only the comments get forwarded. Also with the Akismet plugin it acts perfectly to reduce the amount of spam remarkably.
You can download this plugin here: Download SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam.
You can read more and view details on installation: SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Homepage.
Note: While installing in some WordPress blogs you may see that captcha code is displayed under the submit button. Best place to display captcha code is just above the main comments text box. But some blog themes do not support this, but there is simple workaround for this. Follow the below simple steps.
1. Login to WordPress with your admin account.
2. Now go to Appearance Tab on left side, expand and click Editor.
3. Now click on “Comment.php” from the right side.
4. Now locate the <?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?> (You can search for it).
5. Now you need to find out <p><textarea name…… from the code and place the above code just before this code.
6. Save it (Update it.)
7. Also go to your plugins section and click on the settings of SI CAPTCH plugin.
8. And uncheck “Change the display order of the captcha” check box.
9. Now check the WordPress comment, your captcha code will be displayed exactly above the main comment text box.
You should have proper file rights before doing this. Another option to do this is to download comments.php file from your host and then open it in a notepad and make the above changes and re upload it back.
Hope this helped, do comment. 🙂
