Wordpress Security

WP-SpamFree is different from most anti-spam plugins. Instead of trying to use complex algorithms to determine whether or not a comment is spam, the plugin uses javascript to weed out automated comment bots.

Unfortunately this will stop some legitimate folk from leaving comments (like users of the NoScript add-on for FireFox) but so far it hasn’t been too much of a problem with my own blog. For the total elimination of spam it’s at least worth a test.

Blog comment spammers do what they do to syphon link juice away from blog posts. And if you have an understanding of SEO you’ll realize that newer blog posts won’t have a page rank, and may not even be indexed in Google. This makes them fairly useless to these spammers.

The simple solution to their problem however is to simply target older blog posts with their spam comments. Luckily, Wordpress has a feature that combats this fairly well: the ability to disable comments on older blog posts. It’s certainly not a perfect solution because many bloggers prefer to leave discussion open across all their posts (myself included – for now at least) but the option is there.

How to Disable Comments on Older Posts

1. Navigate to the Discussion page, which is located under Settings in the menu.
2. Under Other comment settings simply check the box that says Automatically close comments on articles older than X days
3. Depending on the size of your blog you’ll want to change the value of X, but I feel the default of 14 days would be suitable in most situations. The more popular your blog is the lower the number you need to combat spam effectively.
4. Confirm the changes by clicking on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.