Comment spam is a huge issue for WordPress blog owners. I remember when I started my first blog, and it was shortly after that when I started seeing the comment spam pouring in. I took it personally, as if I was being targeted and attacked, but that was a misunderstanding of what was really happening. The true nature of how most spam comments are submitted to your blog is that they are generated by robots, who don’t know anything about you or your blog. By robots, which I will call “bots”, I mean computers that have been programmed to find blogs and comment on blog posts. You don’t really think a real person would waste their time trying to post that spam on your website, do you? Well, they don’t, and that’s why it’s going to be easy to stop.
Why Use Comment Redlist?
WordPress has a Comment Blacklist. When you put words or IP addresses into the blacklist, incoming comments are checked against it, and if there is a match, WordPress will mark it as spam. That spam gets stored in the database, and you can look at the spam comments to verify that they are indeed spam. This is all fine and good, but if spam is truly spam, then why store it in the database? If an IP address is in the blacklist, why should the person or bot with that IP address have any access to the blog, and why should their comment be stored in the database? I’d rather just block spam comments and spammers, and this is where my Comment Redlist plugin shines.
The core feature of Comment Redlist is the ability to totally block spam based on words, character sequences, or IP addresses. The spam will not be inserted into your database. Comment Redlist also has some optional features that make it detect just about every spam comment that comes your way. I know you’re going to like it.
Internationalization – i18n
I only speak English, but if you would like to translate Comment Redlist into your language, I’d be glad to add it.
Spanish – es_ES translation added 12/18/2013. Credit to Andrew Kurtis of WebHostingHub.
Serbian – sr_RS translation added 7/8/2014. Credit to Ogi Djuraskovic of firstsiteguide.com.