Tackling WordPress Spam

I transferred all my personal and business blogs from MovableType to WordPress because of the comment-spam epidemic that was engulfing big chunks of space, not to mention the bandwidth. For some time there was respite, but I again started experiencing the same shity problem.

Fortunately WordPress is written in PHP and I know how to tweak it. There is a neat way of beating the spammers. The comment spammers need to know the file that handles the comment data, and in WordPress case, it is wp-comments-post.php. So if the name of this file is changed to something totally weird, you can probably beat the spammers. There are three files that refer to wp-comments-post.php, namely:

wp-comments.php
wp-comments-popup.php
wp-comments-reply.php

In these files, find the line that begins with <form…and change the name of wp-comments-post.php to whatever new name you have opted for. Then upload all the files, including the renamed file. And don’t forget to delete wp-comments-post.php if it is still there on your server.