My 3rd WAnniversary and Stopping Spammy Trackbacks

Hello All!

Long time, no see.

So I have now been a WA member for 3 years now. I'm not much of an active contributor in WA these days but I didn't hesitate to renew my subscription since I have the black friday deal from a few years ago which is great and I am very happy with the WA hosting for my websites.

Anyway I just wanted to share a quick tip in this post which you may or may not find useful. It might be blindingly obvious to some of you but it worked for me to solve a rather irritating problem.

I had been getting a lot of spammy comments with trackbacks left on the most popular article on one of my sites. This was despite the fact that I have an anti-spam plugin and don't allow trackbacks.

Most of the comments were designed to look genuine with things like "Thanks for the great article. This really helped me" in the body text but the commenters name was something like "buy viagra online" and a link to some dodgy online seller.

To stop this I decided to disallow some specific words in comments.

Since the trackbacks were all for "impotence drugs" I disallowed the following words: viagra, cialis, pharmacy, pharmacies and doctor..

This stopped almost all the trackback comments and this week I added the word "medication" to the list to eradicate a few that slipped through.

To disallow specific words in comments you go to your wordpress dashboard:

Open Settings in the side menu and select Discussion.

About halfway down there is a section called Disallowed Comment Keys where you can type in specific words or phrases that you want to ban from comments.

This has almost completely eradicated this problem for me.

Hope it helps someone.

All the best for now and have a good weekend.

Regards

Dave