How to Handle Comments Contact Mail from Your Website

byCLPeterson

295 followers

Updated 7 years ago

I know this is basic training, but there are a lot of people out there who are new that don't know HOW to handle the comments on their website.

You are so excited when you set up your comments area or your contact me area on your website. You can't wait to start engaging with your audience. Then one day you see a little icon (or whatever notification you've set up) that says "you've got mail!"

Excited, you open up your "mail", but it looks a little strange.

Hello, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it’s driving me crazy so any support is very much appreciated.

Your blog topic is how to make 100 recipes using ground beef. So you think, huh? Then you respond -- I did too.

I didn't realize there were people who would write to me to hijack my little bitty site.

So now I run my comments thru this checklist:

Is the email a valid address? https://email-checker.net/check

If email checker comes back with anything but a green ok -- it goes in the trash.

Is the website they've listed for themselves a valid one and is it "bad", i.e. porno site in disguise.

Check the url here first -- https://safeweb.norton.com/

Then actually visit the listed website.

Ok, let's assume that comment above has passed these two tests (email & url) but since the wording is not really matching the subject of the page, you can do this: copy the whole wording of the comment and paste it into a google search bar. It will pop up if someone has posted that same exact wording elsewhere.

I failed to do this last step and I have this as a comment on my website. :(

If you are interested in spam -- they even have a museum for internet spam https://thecommentspamblog.wordpress.com .

I do use the askimet plugin but these got through anyway.

I am now starting to get a few spam messages through my contact us form. I did a search on WA and found this training:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/creating-... creating a contact us form that is spam proof

I also use an additional plugin: Peter's Literal Comments. This prevents someone from coding "extra" stuff into the comment area.

For the spammy email I get through our contact us page, I use the same procedure that I used for evaluating spammy comments.

Oh, by the way, you do have your comment area set to moderation, don't you? I hope you aren't allowing people to write directly on your website.

I hope this was helpful to you. I know when I started out, people said I should moderate my comment area but I didn't have a clue on HOW to do this.

If you have your own procedure or checker, please let me know in the comments below.

Thanks so much for reading!

Cindy