Forcing registration just will annoy the real nice people who would post intelligent comments on your blog 🙂
Spam is usually trackback spam and yes, automated.
Use some antispam plugins. Although you might have difficulties finding older versions of those to fit your WP version.
Good plugins:
BadBehavior
SpamKarma
Of course, an update wouldn’t hurt. WARNING: Upgrade to 2.0.7 – not to the latest 2.1.
Thanks for your feedback. How soon do you think it will be before you can say: “Upgrade to 2.1?” If days or a few weeks, would save me an upgrade.
Out of curiosity, can one force people to register before posting? I don’t see how to do that.
You mean posting posts or posting comments?
When? I don’t know…
Great article, moshu. Sane advice. I wish folks read it before they came here. :>)
Digg it… spread the word 😉
I meant can you make people register before they post comments in reply to your blog posts.
Yes you can. Go to the Admin panel and under Options->General near the middle is the option: ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’ just check it.
Yes, you can, as Ajd777 said above. Although that’s exactly the thing I wrote earlier that you should NOT do: it will not stop any spam but will annoy genuine commenters.
I have registered at a number of blogs and posted my comments in reply. However, I know some folks won’t bother to register and comment. But the bigger issue, for me (I get read; don’t get a lot of comments) is the spam. So I am curious, if spam is automated, why won’t forcing folks to register and log-in before commenting stop spam?
Because the automated scripts don’t use your comment form, they go around it hitting directly the post-comment file.
It has been exaplained n+1 times…
There must be a reason that we advise using anti-spam plugins.
