Quick WordPress Websites for Beginners: Step 5
Stopping The Spam
Today we are going to talk about stopping the spam on your WordPress Website.
Spam is a problem everywhere and blogs or blogsites get no reprieve.
What you need to do to solve this is install a plugin to prevent spam. The one I'm going to recommend here is Akismet.
Using Akismet will solve about 99.9% of any problems you might have with spam on your blogsite.
How do you install it?
Well the first thing you will need to know is that Akismet is automatically installed in your plugins section of your blog. Click on 'Plugins' from the left menu bar, find Akismet and click 'activate'.
The next thing you will need to do is get an API key from WordPress.com. This part is a little confusing because you can actually host a blog at WordPress.com but that is not what you want to do here. You just need to go to WordPress.com, sign up for a free account, go to your account settings to get the API key and then go back to your wordpress website (which is installed on your domain name at your hosting account like we've been talking here all along) and enter the API key.
Now log back into your wordpress website admin area and follow these directions:
Once the API key is entered your Akismet spam protector is all ready to go. Then whenever you want to see what lovely people spammed you, just check the comments section and click Spam and you'll see how well Akismet filtered them out.
The only thing I would say is check the spam filter every once in a while. Spammers are getting smarter slowly and they sometimes are good at getting their comments approved. By the same token because they are so similar sometimes non-spammers get caught in the filter too.
