by Melissa Gilbert

Created on: September 15, 2009   Last Updated: September 16, 2009

Preventing spam on your wordpress blog can be easier than you think if you know where to look for it. Now, there are two flavors of wordpress. They are the regular single standalone and the mu which stands for multiple users. No matter which version you do plan on going with, there is plugins that will prevent spam on your blog. Spam prevention is something that wordpress should have added into wordpress. Instead we have to rely on third party plugins and hope that they actually work. There are two plugins that I would suggest to have as one will pick up where the other left off. There is spamfree and WP-recaptcha.

Spamfree prevents your blog from getting spam comments. If it reads a comment as spam, they will delete it for you and you will never get an email saying that you have a comment waiting for you to okay. It does all the work for you and it's usually right on target. Is it possible to get a spam comment through it? Anything is possible. As a rule of thumb, it usually picks everything up that it should. There are no instances that there is a false positive.

WP-Recaptcha picks up where spamfree may miss. There are two different version of this available. One is for the single user version which also probably works on the mu version, but there is a version out there just for the mu. If you have mu, you are better off using the one that is designed for mu as when you install the plugin, there is a different directory that you upload the files to. What wp-recaptcha does is when someone registers or posts a comment on your blog, there is a box that has a code and then below that usually, there is a place you put in that code. Usually those particular codes are two words. This prevents spammers from registering and posting comments that they should not be positng. It is really easy to set up. It will ask you for some recaptcha keys to set it up. Go to the recaptcha website. Signup and get the key and put it right in your recaptcha settings where it asks for the keys.

By doing all of this, it will keep the spammers out. The only time that this will not keep them out is if they are using human spammers. In most cases when you get spam, it is usually spambots whom are causing the spam problems in the first place. Are having these plugin fool proof? The answer would be no. Nothing is fool proof. They find their way around things eventually. If you keep a close eye and keep things up to date, the problems with spam may be very low if any.

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