Are you getting a lot of spam comments on your WordPress blog? Spam comments can become a big problem as your website grows. In this tutorial, we are going to share how to use the Antispam Bee plugin to block spam comments in WordPress.
Why should you block or delete spam comments?
Spam comments take up unnecessary space in your WordPress hosting database. What's worse is that if you accidentally approve a spam comment, your brand is bad.
There are several ways to block spam comments in WordPress. You can do this manually by reading them and deleting them one by one, but it could take hours.
You can also use the free Antispam Bee plug-in to automatically block unwanted comments based on the rules you have defined.
Let's take a look at how to block spam comments in WordPress with Antispam Bee plugin.
Using Antispam Bee to block spam comments
The first thing to do is to install and activate the plugin Antispam Bee . For more details, see our step-by-step guide to way to install a WordPress plugin .
Once activated, you must go to the page Settings »Antispam Bee in your WordPress admin area.
On this screen, you will see the Antispam Bee settings divided into three sections: Antispam Filter, Advanced tools and More options.
Antispam filter
The spam filter settings are the basic settings that help you detect spam comments. This allows you to filter and review comments before they appear on your blog posts or website.
These settings are organized in the order they execute. We have explained each setting in the descriptions below.
Approve approved commentators
You can enable this option to automatically approve comments from regular and trusted reviewers. These commenters can post valid comments and generate conversations about your blog posts, so that the plugin remembers them and approves their comments right away.
Trust commentators with a Gravatar
This setting will allow you to approve comments from users with a specific Gravatar image and display valid comments. This is the same technique as trusted reviewers, but with this setting the plugin will remember the gravatar of trusted decision makers.
Consider the comment time
If enabled, the filter will consider the time of the comment. This setting is not recommended by the plug-in author for blogs or websites using the cached pages.
BBCode is a spam
It is recommended that you check comments with BBCode (Bulletin Board Code) links and mark them as spam. These format links are widely used by spammers to highlight words and links.
Validate the commenters IP address
The plugin allows you to validate IP addresses used by commenters to verify their network information like hostname. This helps find the speaker's online context to decide whether the comment is useful or spam.
Use regular expressions
If enabled, it helps to find unwanted comments with a set of predefined templates that are useful for detecting spam.
Look in the local spam database
If you check this option, it will look for spam content on your site's database and then process it when you set other spam settings.
Use a public anti-spam database
This parameter is related to Stop Spam from the forum to detect the IP addresses of active spammers and quickly check the history of commenters. It works with full senders IP addresses, so commenters from EU countries will be avoided.
Block comments from some countries
You can add the list of specific countries to filter out unwanted comments. The blacklist and whitelist ISO codes are given with this parameter, so you can easily declare the country codes in the respective sections.
Allow comments only in certain languages
This setting allows you to specify a language for commentators, so comments in all other languages will be blocked or deleted as you will define later.
Advanced tools
In the advanced settings, you can set the options to manage, block and delete unwanted comments. There are few settings enabled by default, but you can change these settings as needed.
Mark as spam, do not delete
If you enable this setting, it will keep unwanted comments and will not delete them until you enable the settings below.
Spam-Notification by email
If you enable this option, you will receive an email notification for each unwanted comment. We don't recommend this setting as it will get extremely boring very quickly.
Do not record the reason for spam
If this option is enabled, suspicious values of a comment will not be stored in a separate column. These suspicious values can be formatted links, comment time and more.
Delete existing spam after X days
This is an important option because it allows you to set the number of days after which spam comments are automatically deleted. It relates to many other settings that we discussed above about deleting comments.
Limit approval to comments / pings
This option defines whether you want to approve comments or trackbacks. If you limit approval to comments, trackbacks will be automatically removed. Likewise, if you limit the approval of trackbacks, spam comments will automatically be removed from your blog or website.
In case this option is not enabled, it follows the previous settings.
Delete comments for spam reasons
You can delete comments with predefined spam reasons. You can select multiple reasons from the options to automatically remove unwanted comments.
These advanced settings will make your life easier while reviewing the comments on your site.
More options
After the advanced settings, you can take a look in the reports options to view your daily spam updates on the WordPress admin dashboard area.
These reports will help you monitor unwanted comments easily, and you can also analyze the number of useful and unwanted comments.
Generate statistics as a dashboard widget
When enabled, this setting will create a spam report in an interactive widget for your WordPress admin dashboard area. Those statistics will give you an overview of spam comments on your blog.
Spam counter on the dashboard
If enabled, it will display the total number of comments marked as spam in a prominent style. If you delete unwanted comments, the number of deleted comments also appears in an additional column. Some new bloggers find it fun to watch this issue after their first launch.
Do not check trackbacks / pingbacks
By default, the plugin checks all comments, trackbacks and pings. You can avoid checking trackbacks with this setting. If enabled, trackbacks / pingbacks from any site will be automatically approved.
Comment form used outside posts
This option will monitor comments on your archive pages.
When you are done, click the button Save Changes to apply these settings to your blog.
That's all. We hope this tutorial has helped you block spam comments in WordPress.
