If you manage any WordPress sites, you’ve likely come across your share of comment spam.
This is where your inbox is clogged up with emails saying “New comment on the post [xyz] is waiting for your approval.”
Depending on how easily found the site is and how many sites you manage, these emails can quickly get out of control. Not to mention the dashboard of the sites themselves, which can have thousands of comments queued up for moderation – in many cases all spam!
This happens because spammers use automated systems to crawl the web looking for places to dump their comments.
There are quite a few plugins around to stop comment spam, such as Akismet. I’ve enabled Akismet on several sites but I still find more than half the comments get through as spam. Plus you need to fiddle around with API keys to enable it.
I’ve now found a better solution that is unobtrusive, free, and very simple to set up…
GASP to the rescue!
Growmap Anti Spam Plugin (GASP) adds a simple checkbox to the end of your comment field on all posts, images, archives, etc. which asks the commenter to check the box to confirm they are not a spammer.
This simple solution foils the spambots and means they cannot successfully post a comment.
Which means no more emails in your inbox every day asking you to moderate the comments!
How to install GASP
The simplest way to add GASP to your site is via the admin dashboard.
- Go to Plugins –> Add New –> type “gasp” in the search box.
The GASP plugin will be first hit.
Simply install the plugin and activate it, then log out of your site and see how the comment form now looks. There should be a checkbox that says “confirm you are not a spammer” or similar.
Voila – no more comment spam!
I’ve found so far that this works a lot better than the other plugins out there, and it doesn’t involve any fiddling around. And the best part is that it’s free 🙂
This sounds interesting. I’d like to give it a try. My websites are loaded with spam comments despite using CAPTCHAS. I have a website I programmed myself from scratch that uses it’s own CAPTCHA for account registrations and it made a HUGE difference so it boggles me why a much bigger community like WordPress didn’t have a solution for this problem.
I’m surprised you still got spam when using Captcha, BD. More and more blogs seem to be switching to Disqus now, which is easy to install and cuts spam down to zero (not to mention stuff like related posts).