Dealing with Spam
Posted by Trevor Beck on August 4, 2009
We’ve all had junk come through our e-mail – but the same thing can happen on our web site.
Spam actually comes in two kinds of forms – posts from live users and posts from computers.
Posts from Users
When we allow discussions on our site (see Settings–>Discussions) we allow people to express themselves and their opinions. By approving discussions first, we can control what appears on our site, but sometimes that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Quite often all we want to do is ensure people participate in a respectable way.
For many of us, respectable does not include swearing, so WordPress provides a way to create a list of words that if they appear in a post, that post must first be approved by an administrator. From the Discussions settings, just add the words you want to the list (to get you started you can use this sample of curse-words.)
Posts from computers
Like the spam that hits your e-mail, there’s much generated by computers. Rather than try and manage these yourself, you can enable the WP-SpamFree plugin. It will look after deleting any computer generated spam before it even is posted to your site. As a side benefit, WP-SpamFree can also generate a simple contact form for your users to submit message to you directly.
