victorianeely
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12:20:10 am on July 5, 2008 | # |
I don’t know about you, but a few of my SquidTop posts have been getting hammered by spammers. May all spammers be tarred and feathered. There are a few ways to fight them, though.First, whenever you see a spammy comment, don’t delete it. Mark it as spam. This is supposed to help teach WordPress learn the difference between spam and legitimate comments.
If one of your posts is heavily targeted by spammers, I recommend disabling comments for it. Here’s how:
1. Log into your SquidTop account and go to the “Manage” section of your dashboard.
2. Find the post and edit it.
3. Click on the blue bar to the right that says “Discussion.” This will be right below the Categories box.
4. Uncheck the “Allow comments” option.
5. Click the “Save” button.
Ta-da, spammers can’t hit that post anymore.
Unfortunately, it also means that non-spammers won’t be able to comment. However, once a post gets fairly old, it’s unlikely to get more attention from people who would usually leave a legitimate comment.
Susan Villas Lewis 1:00 pm on July 5, 2008 | #
Ah, thank you!! I’ve found that they tend to hit the exact same posts all the time. Before it was my posts to set up Technorati and BlogCatalog, so I just deleted those as unimportant. But they’ve found another one and I’m really sick of it. Seriously. Get a life.
Off to fix that one post for good. Oh, and I will be adding a note to the bottom of the post to mention that comments are disabled, so leave a note elsewhere for me if you like. Maybe that will help.
spirituality 2:05 pm on July 5, 2008 | #
I can never find the ‘mark this as spam’ button… Where is it?
victorianeely 2:35 pm on July 5, 2008 | #
Susan - I know, I was just about getting ready to bang my head against something when a couple of my posts were getting hit a dozen or more times a day! I also think adding notes about comments being turned off is a good idea; I try to do that so no one gets confused.
Spirituality - When you log into your SquidTop blog and access your dashboard, you should see a big fat box to the right that shows you the latest comments and activity. Sometimes at the top you’ll see new comments waiting to be moderated by you.
When you go to moderate the comments, you should see a row of radio buttons beneath each one. I think they’re marked like this: Approve, Delete, and Spam. Once you select the option you want, you need to hit the “bulk moderate” button.
This is assuming you didn’t change your SquidTop blog to automatically approve all comments.
You can still dump approved comments by going to the Comments section.
Susan Villas Lewis 9:51 am on July 6, 2008 | #
A dozen!! Wow. OK, you win. I was getting one a day on just one post. And apparently, as of this morning, they’ve picked a new post to hit. Sigh. It’s really not that big of an issue for me, but it is a pain. I wish the system would go - hey, there are no real words in this post. it’s spam - not expect me to do anything about it.
victorianeely 2:26 am on July 9, 2008 | #
It’s about as bad for my Little Squid blog, so I installed a more aggressive spam filtering plugin to deal with the problem. Take that, spamheads!