Blog Setup – Part 3 – Comments and Spam

Video Transcript

In the previous class, we covered a couple of important pages to have in order to begin a successful blog. This class will cover among other things how to set up your blog to allow comments and how to help prevent comment spam.
Now in a previous class or we detailed the discussion section over here under settings we went over all the stuff allowing comments either throughout your entire site all the time or on a post by post or page by page basis. So I’m going to refer you to that class for all of those details. So to avoid repeating everything covered in that class, I will just say that my suggestion is to turn off or uncheck all these boxes here at the top part of your discussion settings page under default article settings because this is going to disable the comments sitewide then activate them just on the posts and pages that you want to allow comments.

And again, all that is detailed in that previous class for recovered the discussion section under settings. Now this alone is going to help cut way back on the spam and you’re going to get, and speaking of spam, you should have a plug in, installed and activated to help prevent or at least minimize the spam comments. So if you go into plugins, add new, that’s kind of where we are here.

And then in the plugin search box up here, type in the word spam. This is going to pull in the search results that you would find on wordpress.org and as you can see, there’s quite a few of them in here. Now, not all of these are spam related, like for example WP optimize that deals with your database and some of these are way overkill. Like this one here is great for overall site security.
I wouldn’t use it, but it is great for that. It’s just overkill. It does a lot more stuff in. Some of it is stuff you shouldn’t even have on a plugin, but that’s the makings of a different video altogether. The big ones when it comes to Anti-spam is AKismet and the one that I use on all my sites is anti-spam. Bee. Both are free, kind of I say kind of because a Kismet is free only for noncommercial sites. So if you have any income generating items on your site, technically you cannot use a kismet. Well, I mean you can, but it’s going to cost you money each month and you can learn more about that by clicking on the more details here. Now, anti-spam B, however, it doesn’t cost anything no matter what type of site you’re using, whether it’s a commercial or noncommercial. In other words, if you’re making money on it or not, you can use anti-spam B plus.

Anti-Spam Bee is very lightweight unlike some of these other anti spam plugins that have a lot more bells and whistles, most of which you don’t even need. And we just take a quick look at installing and activating anti-spam. Be just like any other plugin, you install it activated. You can click on the settings share from the plugins page or from the settings section. Over here on the left Sidebar, you’ve got a new add on here for anti-spam be the default settings are just fine the way they are, so really right out of the box install, activate, you’re good to go. There are some more options that you can check if you want, but I’ll leave that to you to decide now along with comments and dealing with the comment spam, a couple of other items you should consider in putting together a successful blog is the use of social sharing and having some way to collect the contact info like names and email addresses from your readers.
Now in the next couple of classes, we’re going to dive into the collection of your readers contact info, but before we close out this class, let’s head to our add new plugins page again, and I’m going to show you a couple of the possibilities for your social sharing plugins. I’ve already pulled up a couple of here. Again, you go to the add new plugins section in the search plugins, Xbox appeared type in social sharing and it’ll pull in all these options here. And as you can see there’s quite a few to choose from, but it’ll pull in all the options just as you would get from the wordpress.org site.

And the problem is some of these social sharing plugins is that they come with a lot of baggage and they can really be resource intensive. They can slow your site down. The problems will far outweigh the benefits with the exception of a couple.

This one, WordPress, social sharing plugin, Sassy social share, say that three times fast. This has my two thumbs up recommendation. And the other one that I would also recommend is one of the light bulbs here. These script plus social sharing. This one actually is in my opinion, better than Sassy, but unless you have your own option, I would suggest going with script plus or Sassy. And that’s gonna bring us to the end of this class on the setup of comments and dealing with a comment spam in this section of how to start a blog as well as a quick look at a couple of social sharing plugins you should consider adding to your WordPress site. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.