Moderating comments on a WordPress site especially spam comments can be very frustrating if your site have thousands on traffic daily or depending on the source of your site’s traffic. This post will show you how to moderate and stop spam comments on your WordPress site.
When a comment is made on any post or page of your site, you will get a notification on your admin dashboard (you can also get an email notification if you’ve turned it on). Here’s how a typical comment look like in the admin dashboard.
The comment shows the comment author’s name, the comment body, the post or page the comment was made, date and time, actions to be performed on the comment (approve, reply, quick edit, edit, spam and trash) – the difference between spam and trash is that the trash action will remove the comment while the spam action will remove the comment and also mark the sender’s email address as a spam email – so likely next comment from the email will be marked as spam except you mark it manually as not spam.
To moderate your comment:
Click on settings > discussion
Whether you put all your comments on hold for approval but it can become stress despite that if your site fall into the den of spammers. You can get up to 300 spam comments daily with few genuine comments in between and it can stressful vetting the genuine ones for approval.
First, make sure you select the option in the screenshot below ‘Comment author must fill out name and email’ in order to reduce the bot spammers.
Another important settings, is the option you need to set before a comment can automatically appear on a post or page. Select ‘comment must be manually approved’ to manually approve all your comments and select ‘comment author must have a previously approved comment’ if you want to automatically approve comments from a reader with previously approved comment on the site.
The next settings in the screenshot below contain two section:
Comment Moderation: you need to specify if or when any comment contain a particular word, author name, URL, email, IP address then the comment should be held for moderation (only if you set your comment to be automatically published).
Disallowed Comment Keys: Specify if or when any comment contain a particular word, author name, URL, email, IP address then the comment should be automatically moved to trash (you can do this for spam comments)
Scroll down and click on save changes to save the changes you’ve made.
