Suggestions From Community About Pitfalls Of Open Comments?

  • For 3 years, I have not allowed general comments (only from our pre-approved, registered users). I am considering opening up comments to all; hopefully, to boost traffic and interaction on the website.

    I have never had open comments. Can the community offer any suggestions about how to best go about this? I want reduce or eliminate spam, cursing, offensive language, etc.

    Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Plugins? Black Lists? Comment Requirements (email, name, etc.)? Other techniques?

    Thanks,
    Chris

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • This is probably obvious, but you should get the Akismet plugin. It’s great for stopping most of the obvious, automated spam. If you still get bad comments after that, you can enable the setting which puts all first time commenters through approval first (after which they can post further comments instantly), but obviously that would add more work for you.

    Thread Starter cfisher

    (@cfisher)

    Thanks chadrew.

    Would you suggest forcing folks to sign up for a user account? Or allow comments as long as they provide a name and email? It seems the latter will generate the most comments, but potentially the most spam too.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    No, I would allow for open comments.

    I’d also use Cookies for Comments and Bad Behavior, in addition to Akismet to keep down spam.

    There’s this post, too, about characters you can put in your blacklist to stop even more:
    https://perishablepress.com/wordpress-blacklist-characters/

    I’ve got open comments, and very little spam gets through.

    Thread Starter cfisher

    (@cfisher)

    Thanks. I will give open comments a try. I’ll check out the black list too!

    I also decided to try Defensio for anti-spam. One thing I do not understand is that I turned off pingbacks and trackbacks in the WordPress Discussion settings as I only want actual reader comments to articles to appear. However, I have comments, presumably pings and trackbacks from other blogs, appearing now in the article comments sections. Am I doing something wrong?

    Thanks everyone for these suggestions..

    Chris

    Thread Starter cfisher

    (@cfisher)

    I thought I had after I posted this; the Defensio filter takes time to train. Perhaps that is why I am seeing those comments.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    The ping backs show up because they hit the URL directly. I have ’em turned off too and I still have that problem :/

    Thread Starter cfisher

    (@cfisher)

    One of the problems I discovered is that turning off pings/trackbacks only applies to new posts. Thus, I have over 2,000 posts that still allow it, and aside from manually unchecking the settings for each post, I do not know how to change this.

    I wonder if you have the same issue?

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Had, but no longer, since I know SQL ??

    https://code.ipstenu.org/2011/wordpress-open-comments-more-selectively/

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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