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
Recent Comments
28
Happy anniversary! Much appreciate the info, which comes timely because I have been getting a few of those lately. I also get those trying to hijack by sidebars by inserting their link into my affiliate ads. Even when I delete the ad its still imbedded. Any ideas on that?
Thanks,
Bill
You can undo in discussions tab of settings, WordPress sites back office, I have also forwarded couple of links to your PM in regards.
Hi Bill
Hopefully my tip and AbieAJ’s advice will help solve these problems for you.
Thanks
Dave
See more comments
Hi Dave,
It's so nice to hear from you- kudos on your 3-year WAnniversary! You've come a long way since then.
Thank you for the tip on avoiding spam comments. I cannot stand getting those (they're so annoying).
But I'll try it out and see what happens- I'm glad to hear you've gotten great results.
Kudos again to three years, and thank you for sharing :)
Regards,
-Eric