Large volume of spam comments getting through filter

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  cweleventhauthor · Member · May 4, 2014 at 9:21 am

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  A lot of spam comments are getting through the Akismet comment spam filter and appearing in our comments section. Is there anything that can be done other than deleting them and marking them as spam manually?

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  iandunn · Member · May 6, 2014 at 4:43 pm

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  Hi Adam, unfortunately there aren’t any silver bullets; spammers are constantly working to get around filters and are much more organized and well funded than is commonly believed.

  Rather than deleting spam that gets past our filters, the best thing you can do is to mark it as spam, since that helps us catch new patterns and techniques. Without those reports, we wouldn’t be able to be nearly as effective as we are.

  However, there are a few other things you can do. There are several settings available on the Discussion Settings page (http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/) so that you can tweak how comments are handled.

  In particular, I’d recommend enabling the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” option. The first time a new visitor leaves a comment, it will be held in moderation until you manually approve it, but after that their future comments will be approved automatically.

  Some additional options are discussed at http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

  I hope that helps. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
  Ian