Managing Spam Comments

Conditional CAPTCHA for Wordpress by Samir Shah frees up time for website owners so they can concentrate on more important things. Don't get me wrong feedback from visitors is very important. You can get a good feel of the level of interest of visitors, comments allow you to interact with your visitors, they allow you to judge their level of learning too. But with public comments come spam and that is were managing spam comments becomes vital.

Owning a website comes with having to invest your time in maintaining it. Your time is critical part of a successful website and WordPress Addons can save you that time. Sifting through hundreds of spam comments daily is not my idea of having fun so I look for tools to cut down on the amount of comments that are accepted. One Wordpress addon that resolves this problem is called Conditional CAPTCHA for Wordpress. Simply put it requires the commenter to fill out a security field when leaving a comment and if the security fields returns a false then it automatically deletes the comment.

CAPTCHA works in conjunction with Akismet by Matt Mullenweg. This is preloaded addon when you install wordpress onto your website. It is found under plugins tab which can be accessed on the backend of Wordpress.

Key Benefits...

# If Akismet identifies a comment as spam, it will ask the commenter to complete a simple CAPTCHA.

# If they fail, then the comment will be automatically discarded or trashed (and won't clutter up your spam queue).

# If they pass, it will be allowed into the spam queue. That way the spam queue will contain only the most likely false positives, making it much easier to identify them.

# Meanwhile, genuine commenters (i.e., those not flagged by Akismet) will be able to comment on your blog hassle-free, and without CAPTCHAs.

The plugin lets you choose between the default CAPTCHA (a simple text-based test) and reCAPTCHA (this requires getting a free API key). You can style the CAPTCHA page to fit with your theme using CSS. Here is a demo of the CAPTCHA page.

The next article will cover a more indepth look on how to use Askimet and Conditional CAPTCHA for Wordpress.