The Technical Side of Blogging – Part 2: Using Spam Filters

Spam filters in a blog are as important as your AC filter. If you don’t have it you’ll have all sorts of trash and ads and spam messages in your comments. Wouldn’t that mean you’ll have a lot of comments? Ofcourse it will show as if you have 100’s of 1000’s of comments, but all of them will only generate more spam and might link to phishing sites. Therefore you’ll end up getting so many trash comments your visitors will stop looking at the comments and eventually stop commenting since they can’t find the reply to their comments.

What to use ?

I suggest you use Akismet.

For personal blogs its a free option, that filters out all your comments. Setting it up takes a few mins and a couple of verification emails for an API key. But overall it does the job pretty well and saves you the trouble and effort of looking through all the comments.

How to install Akismet in WordPress?

Here’s a video that’s illustrates how it’s done :

http://youtu.be/d2pr8gISWGA

If you use the FS Contact forms plugin, make sure you have a look at this post  to ensure you don’t get annoying emails from the spam Filters.

Captcha Codes : What are they and why we might use them ?

Captcha codes are those codes you have to enter usually before hitting submit, its a form of verification that ensures that the entity entering the information is a Human being and not an online script or bot. This will in turn reduce the spam messages that you might recieve since bots cannot access the the submit button because they cannot automatically identify and fill in the captcha codes.

I tried implementing captcha codes a while back on 7ajidude (plugin called “Captcha”), but due to popular demand i had to remove it since it affected our commentors. It required a simple math calculation but was an extra hurdle we decided later on to live without. 

Sometimes without implementing Captcha codes you get so many spam messages your database fills up quickly and it takes so much resources especially if you’re bombarded with a lot of spam messages all at once. Deciding on whether to use them or not is your choice but if you feel you are affected by too many spam comments and if the processes on your hosting are too high, i’d look at implementing captcha codes for 2 weeks and evaluate the performance and load on servers again. 

That’s the end of part 2. Remember if you have any question please do ask them and i’ll try to include an answer if not here in the comments section in parts 3 and 4. 

For a reminder:

In part 3 we’ll discuss using CDN’s and Storage options to speed up the load time of your website.

In part 4 we’ll discuss the different Plugins that we can use to help us in blogging!