The news section or Blog is now an essential part of most business brochure sites and not only provides potential customers / clients to see what you have been up to recently and to see your most recent activities / services / special events but it allows the search engines to see that you are ‘active’ and by adding content the search engines may ‘value’ your site more highly and reward you with higher rankings and increased visitors. This is certainly the case with some of our more successful websites.
The admin panel of your WordPress Blog allows you full control over the management of your user commnents, by default we dont allow comments on our posts and this is our standard setting by please be aware that if you want to change this standard setting you may be leaving your website open to ‘spammers’ / ‘spambots’ that simply search the internet for these types of sites and leave generic / advertising spam posts. The following sample conversation reveals how much spam could be on your blog if you change the standard settings that we give you and decide to allow free commenting on your blog:
[Blogging Website Owner] Why can people not leave comments on my blog with out logging in? I need people not to have to go through all that malarkey otherwise no one will comment. Also i will pop you over an email later on tonight with finishing touches to the site ok.
[Blog Website Designers] You are at liberty to change the security features of how people post but you will be targetted by spammers once your blog is opened up I have updated your blog so that you must approve the comment and anyone can post freely.
[Blogging Website Owner] Is there a way that you can add a followers section on to a word press blog though? It is much better with people being able to comment on the news section / blog now, although i do know what you mean about spam. Thank god you can approve things before they’re posted. That’s exactly what I wanted for anyone to be able to post freely without signing into anything but I can approve it before it goes on the post.
…………time passes and over 11,000 comments appear on the blog, that have initiated 11,000 emails!
[Blogging Website Owner] I’m going to need you to set up a new e mail address for the word press comments to go to. I am being BOMBARDED with spam comments on the blog and can’t keep up with deleting them and because of that, I’m missing other important e mails I’m getting. Can you set one up and then also change the comment e mail address under my blog to that please, so all the word press emails will then go there. Let me know…or even if there’s anything I can do to decrease the numbers of spamming comments coming in.
[Blog Website Designers] Wow we have just noticed you have now 11,000+ comments on your blog so do you need any of them? I can delete them all at the database then can take over your blog admin and then setup your blog with ‘stronger’ blog comment filtering to keep these down. You had a setting within your blog admin (settings / discussion) to get emailed on every comment and that has been unchecked. There is plugins (some paid some free) that will filter your comments and remove most spam the one ready to run on your blog is akismet but you need an API from the company to use it.
[Blogging Website Owner] I know, its ridiculous right…I can’t keep on top of everything, and i’m not even posting new things at the moment. As a result, i’m missing e mails from people amongst the ‘word press’ over load! To be honest, I really don’t even know if i need any of them but i’m certainly not going to check through 11,000! it will take me the rest of my life, apart from the ones i’ve already approved, maybe i should just forget about the rest of them and maybe you can get rid of them for me? Would appreciate it if you could set up the stronger filtering….alot of them are complete spam like replica watches etc. I don’t understand what you mean by an api. Maybe if we can get these deleted and stronger filtering set up then eventually i can be emailed on the comments again? it’s not really necessary now though. Is it worth still setting up an other email?
[Blog Website Designers] We have deleted all your comments and have changed your ‘discussion’ settings to stop emails and increase the ‘anti-spam’ measures. We have installed a plugin called ‘anti-spam’ that should keep your spam comments down or you can pay to have an increased anti-spam measure used on your blog (akismet), Hope this helps
