Locking Down WordPress

If you run a Blog then I don’t need to tell you what a pain it is to allow comments.  The amount of spam you will receive is unbelievable.  It seems that the world is jam-packed with people who think its ok to use your site to advertise what ever product they are into that day.

So if you care about what’s being said on your site then you end up spending a lot of time moderating whats being said.  That brings us to; locking your site down.  I may be writing this too soon, but I think I have found a fairly good system to fight this.

First, I decided not to allow links or HTML inside of comments, I know, drastic.  But hang in there with me.  My thought is do I care about the number of comments or the quality of comments.  So what I started with was the basic setting inside of WordPress.  Under Settings-Disscussion, I added the following to my Blacklist so any comments with the following will automatically be sent to moderation.  Those terms are: ‘http:’ and ‘https:’, so now any link will be sent to moderation.

Second, I added a plug-in called: Comment Link Manager

The Weberz Hosting comment link manager plugin allows WordPress admins to have more control over the links left on their blogs by comment authors.  The system allows users to remove the nofollow tag from comment links and adds the ability for those links to open in a new browser window.   The CLM plugin also helps admins encourage commenting by rewarding users who comment frequently with links.  The ability to override this setting with a whitelist and blacklist is also available.

Features:

  • Enables admins to remove nofollow attribute from comment author links
  • Allows for optional removal of nofollow attribute from links left in the body of comments
  • Provides admins with the ability to open comment author and body links in a new browser window.
  • Provides ability for admins to require a specified number of comments before enabling comment author links
  • Has built in whitelist and blacklist functions to override general setting of required number of comments

I also added an announcement on the home page letting visitors, that we were no longer allowing links in comments.  Now if everything works right, people who want to comment can do so and their comment will be posted without moderation.  Anyway, I will be posting updates to let everyone now how it goes.