For a new blog, usually there is no issue with spammers.
The reason of being so is because your blog still do not have traffic and spammers unable to locate you.
Usually, once your blog is indexed and searchable with few keywords, it is very likely that spammers will start to target you.
So, who are the spammers?
The spammers are usually the Black Hat SEO guy or some blogger who wanted to practice Black Hat SEO technique by spamming your site to build backlinks.
If you doesn’t know the right way to fight all these spam commentators, you will end up moderating tens to hundreds of comments every single day.
Here, I had been using two WordPress plugins to help me deal with these spammers.
#1 – Akismet
Akismet is a free plugin where under certain conditions and it comes by default in any WordPress installation.
This basically shows how vital it is to have Akismet in your blog.
Akismet is a free plugin but you still need to register an account in order to get the activation.
Below is an example of my one year old site Akismet had successfully filtered 4,000 over spam comments.
You can imagine how busy I was if it was not Akismet that stood in front of me filtering all the spam comments.
#2 – G.A.S.P.
The Akismet is the anti-spam for human spammer.
G.A.S.P. (Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin) on the other side is to fight off spam bots.
What this plugin does is to add another checkbox at the comment side so that in order for the spam bots to comment, they will need to perform an additional task.
Fighting spammer – Final say
Some bloggers over do when they try to fight all these spams. Over do here means, they include a lot of validation before allowing a person to comment on the blog.
If I were the reader who wants to comment, I would not comment anymore after failing twice to comment. Furthermore, I might even unsubscribe from the site.
When you are implementing a protection against spammers, do think as well that you are not making your genuine and loyal readers annoyed.
Have a balance and I personally think that having only these two plugins will help out a lot in fighting spammers.
The post that you are currently reading is one of the WordPress Blog Setup series.
I’m using Antispam Bee + GASP. Both working well together without fail so far. The thing I do not like about Akismet is that oftentimes it tends to block some of the legit comments as well. I don’t have this problem with Antispam Bee as until now.
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I see, Peter.
At times you are right about Akismet. It blocks certain genuine comments and that is why I do manually moderate my comment.
I might look into Antispam Bee if I have the time 😉
Thanks for the tip!