Prevent WordPress Spam 2020.

Are you also won­de­ring how to pre­vent spam in your comm­ents? Of cour­se, the­re are plug­ins that do the who­le thing for you. Howe­ver, with every plug­in you install on your site on the one hand the per­for­mance of your web­site and on the other hand you need to check your plug­ins regu­lar­ly for updates to ensu­re that your Word­Press web­site has as few secu­ri­ty vul­nerabi­li­ties as pos­si­ble.

Limit spam without plugin #

Word­Press alre­a­dy offers you some opti­ons to avo­id unwan­ted spam. To do this, log in to your admi­nis­tra­ti­on inter­face as usu­al and then switch to the fol­lo­wing sec­tion:

1. Gene­ral set­tings
2. Dis­cus­sions

The­re you can enter a set of words in the com­ment blo­cking list that will auto­ma­ti­cal­ly mark the com­ment as spam and disable it.

Automatically moderate comments with links. #

Spam usual­ly con­ta­ins many links to exter­nal sites in order to infect the visi­tor with viru­s­es or inter­cept data. The­r­e­fo­re, Word­Press also offers to search posts for links. Abo­ve a cer­tain amount, which can also be defi­ned via the set­tings in the admi­nis­tra­ti­on inter­face, they are then auto­ma­ti­cal­ly deac­ti­va­ted and queu­ed for veri­fi­ca­ti­on. This pro­vi­des addi­tio­nal safe­ty.

Blacklist for WordPress #

Of cour­se, you don’t always have to reinvent a black­list, so it’s a good idea to draw on exis­ting resour­ces and sim­ply extend exis­ting black­lists with your own words. Of cour­se, you should not sim­ply copy indi­vi­du­al lists, but also check them to ensu­re that you do not acci­den­tal­ly block terms that are rele­vant to you and your users.

But whe­re do you find the terms for your own black­lists?

Grant Hut­chin­son pro­vi­des a detail­ed list of words on his Git­Hub. You can also use the direct link to the Blacklist.txt (curr­ent­ly over 41,000 ent­ries).

Did this post help you? How do you deal with spam? Just drop us a com­ment and let us know what you think.