My customer was attracting a lot of SPAM comments on her WordPress website and asked me if I could make it stop.
Watch me as I remove her current SPAM comments and prevent them from coming into her site in the future.
Would you like to see what I did, LIVE? Click here to receive an invitation to join me LIVE on Zoom.
Step 1: Manually Remove SPAM Comments
- Dashboard > Comments
- Quickly scan all comments to confirm if they are SPAM
- Click the “Author” box to select all (see below)
- Bulk Action button > Mark as SPAM
- Select Spam from the menu
- Click Empty Spam (NOTE: If you have OVER 100 SPAM emails in your Spam folder bulk select one page at a time to avoid crashing your server
Step 2: Stop SPAM Comments On Future Posts
- Dashboard > Settings > Discussions
- Under Default Post settings: uncheck Allow people to submit comments on new posts
Step 3: Stop SPAM on Existing Posts
Step 2 (above) stopped SPAM comments on future posts. To prevent SPAM comments from getting on to your existing Posts:
- Dashboard > Posts > All Posts
- Select all the posts you want the comments removed > Bulk Actions > Edit > Apply
- A new window will open up under Title
- Comments > Do Not Allow
- Update
Plugin for Disabling Comments
Disable Comments is a plugin that will disable comments site wide: Posts, Pages, and Media).
Video Transcript
My customer was receiving a lot of spam comments; there are 176. As I quickly scroll through all her comments, you can see who is sending them. It’s a little bit suspicious.
And also these comments don’t really make a lot of sense. Some of them are in a different language.
Unfortunately she must have approved a few of the comments because WordPress doesn’t allow comments to come in until you approve them. Something from Bollywood.
These just don’t make a lot of sense. So I’m going to be getting rid of the existing comments as well as protecting her site for, for future.
I’m going to go to the comment section. From the dashboard go to comments. Look through all the comments. I know that they are not legitimate, so I’m going to do bulk select by clicking the Author button. Then, from the bulk select dropdown menu, click Mark as spam and Apply.
I will put them into the Spam folder. There’s All, Mine, Pending, Approved, and Spam. They will be added to her spam folder, which currently has 76 SPAM items, or items that have been marked as SPAM. So now I want to go to her Spam folder because I don’t want her spam folder items to go over 100 spam emails, because if it goes over one hundred, it can possibly crash the server. And it also takes quite a while to remove Spam.
As you can see, I’m in her Spam folder because it’s highlighted, or it’s black, as opposed to the others are blue. So once again, I’m going to Bulk Action, Select all under Author and then Delete permanently. Click Apply.
I will go through this process until all of the spam is removed from her Spam folder.
But as you can see in the comments section, we still have 156 spam items, or at least 156 comments to confirm that they are not spam. So I’m going to head back to All, and I’m going to repeat the process again.
There are 20 comments on each page. I will quickly look through this. If a name looks familiar, then it’s very possible it’s someone you know, you don’t want to delete them. But these don’t do not look like they’re legitimate.
They look like spam. I’m going to go through the same process, Bulk select. Mark as spam. Apply.
I will go through this process once again, page by page. And there are eight more pages to go through, but I’ll also will be looking at my spam folder because I don’t want my spam folder to go over 100. So as you can see, it’s a bit of a time-consuming process.
And because it is so time consuming, once we get rid of the spam in her current spam comments folder we’ll be moving onto the next step, which is to stop the comments from coming into future posts that she creates.
Because I have 100 spam comments I’m going to click Empty spam. This is another option.
As long as I have one hundred or fewer, when I click Empty spam, that will empty out my spam folder. That was a much quicker way than going through page by page.
Back to All. This gets me back to my current Comments that have come in, and that are waiting for my approval.
It looks like these had been a approved, but this really is SPAM. It’s the erotic film.
We know comments from Ginny are good.
And there again, I’m going to go to her Spam folder because it’s under 100 spams. The spam says 68.
I’m going to click Empty spam.
The next thing I’m going to do is stopping any spam coming into future posts. And for that I’m in the Dashboard and I’m going to go down to Settings and Discussion. And from here I’m going to uncheck, Allow people to submit comments on new posts. And then click Save changes.
The next step is I want to stop spam coming in on existing Pages and Posts. There were two comments from people the site owner knew, so I don’t want to get rid of those comments. They’re both from this one post, Strengthen Your Immune System.
I’m going to show you what I’m going to do to stop spam on existing Posts and Pages.
Go to dashboard and Posts and All posts. Select All, except that there’s one post that I want to keep the comment so I will uncheck that. Then click Apply.
Another screen comes up. Under Comments I want to choose Do not allow. Click Update. Doing this will not allow anyone to comment on any of these Posts and that will stop all spam coming into the posts that are currently on your page. Whereas, what we did previously, that stopped any spam comments from Posts or Pages you create in the future.
After I refreshed the Page, you can see there are no more comments on her page. It took out the spam comments, but because we’re saying we don’t want anyone to comment on the existing pages or future pages, this is what the site will now look like.
The other thing I wanted to show you was a plugin called Disabled Comments.
This will work as well. This is really great if you have a huge site and you’re getting well over a hundred comments a day. But if you do the work I showed you, you would not have to install a plugin. Some people don’t like installing plugins. They feel that it slows their site down, and it can. And plugins can cause problems.
The three steps I showed you about how to get rid of comments could be a great solution for you.
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